


Do To Ride The River

by afterandalasia



Category: Toy Story (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: disney_kink, Corruption, Dark Jessie, Dystopia, F/M, Memory Loss, Mental Health Issues, Mildly Dubious Consent, Movie: Toy Story 3, Past Brainwashing, Permanent Character Death, Psychological Trauma, Sunnyside, Temporary Character Death, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-26
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-04-09 04:56:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 32
Words: 36,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4334678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Woody never learns the truth about Sunnyside, and never returns. It isn't until two years later that he hears a terrible truth - that there was darkness in Sunnyside and, worse, it has infected those whom he loves. He had thought that his friends would be happy there - instead he learns that they are being torn apart and that one of their own has become the new dark and desperate ruler of the daycare. Instead of the peace for which he hoped, he finds himself having to save himself - and the others - once again. Only this time, it's too late to save them all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From the beyond stunning [prompt](http://disney-kink.livejournal.com/361.html?thread=2189417#t2189417) on Disney Kink:
> 
>  
> 
> _What if Woody never found out the truth about Sunnyside and didn't return to save his friends? What if he returns two years later to visit, only to find out Lotso has been dethroned and Jessie has taken over Sunnyside? What if Jessie isn't the Jessie he remembers and won't let him leave?_
> 
>  
> 
> _Basically the story of why, what, and how this could happen. Dark themes, such as revenge, corruption, desperatism, sex, insanity, torture, etc. Not your typical, fluffy, funny Toy Story. Make it as long/short as you like._
> 
>  
> 
> _Bonus:_  
>  -Buzz/Jessie is included (somewhere)  
> -Jessie's hair is cut or her appearance changes.
> 
>  
> 
> ~
> 
> So, this is technically me deanoning. The original fill was started in 2011 and (*cough*) finished in 2014, so a lot of things changed for me over time, but I loved the prompt too much to let go of finishing it. I intend to redraft this some day, as four years has been a long time for my writing as well (!), but I still like how the story turned out and wanted to upload it here.
> 
> In cowboy speak, someone who would "do to ride the river" is someone that you would trust to have your back even in the most dangerous of situations.
> 
>  
> 
> There is something vaguely dub-con about Buzz/Jessie, in that she is not in a mentally healthy place and he doesn't fully understand as their relationship becomes sexual. However, it is as consensual as it can be in the circumstances.
> 
> The end gets to implied Buzz/Jess/Woody, which I didn't originally intend but which grew over time.
> 
> For **SPOILER NOTES** on which character deaths are permanent and which are temporary, and who the victim of the torture is, see notes at end of fic.

_The trail's a lane, the trail's a lane,_  
Dead is the branding fire.  
The prairies wild are tame and mild,  
All close-corralled with wire.  
The sunburnt demigods who ranged  
And laughed and lived so free  
Have topped the last divide, or changed  
To men like you and me.

 

  
The Passing of the Trail, by Badger Clark

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It was better if he didn't interrupt them, he figured. Give them time to settle in, get used to being there, get used to being Daycare toys and not _Andy's_ toys. Perhaps after a while the names would rub off them, and they wouldn't necessarily be owned, even though they were played with.

Freedom, Woody supposed, was something that will take a lot of getting used to. It wasn’t something that he wanted yet either, he realised in some of the long, quiet nights when he could hear Bonnie breathing in the darkness and he patted her hand gently. He wanted to have an owner still, to _belong_ to a child, to be an owned toy for a while longer. So he let it be, and time passed, and soon Bonnie doesn’t go to the Daycare any more because she’s just that little bit older. She went to kindergarten again, and he got taken in for Show And Tell, and because Bonnie’s mother had done some reading online (and Woody got Trixie to look up Woody’s Round Up on the internet and ‘accidentally’ leave it for Bonnie’s mother to see), he was everyone’s favourite. And it’s just a pity that he’s missing his hat.

Then suddenly it was the first day of preschool, and the toys crept up to look out of the window to watch the car leave, and everyone sighed and looked happy. “And so the ages of the world do so swiftly pass us by,” said Mr. Pricklepants, and it was generally presumed that this must mean the same as what all the rest of them were thinking.

They waited through the day with bated breath, certain that Bonnie would tell them everything when she got home that evening, and Dolly laughed softly at Woody’s flustered behaviour and concern for the girl, and stroked his shiny hair, and waited until he was calm again. Then the front door opened, and they scrambled back to their places, and Bonnie came running excitedly up the stairs.

“Look, Mr. Pig!” she declared, throwing open the door and sending her backpack bouncing on the bed. From where he lay, Woody could not see the new toy in her hands, but he could easily guess that it was one from the way that he could hear her spinning to show it the whole room. “This is going to be your new home now! You sit here, and I’ll get Mommy to get you some glue so we can fix your ear and foot!”

Then she was gone, running down the stairs, and Woody rolled himself over so fast he almost got tangled in his pullstring, and jumped down from the bed to run to the desk. It had only been a glimpse of pink ceramic, nothing more special than that, but if he’d had a heart it would have been pounding in his chest as he jumped up onto the chair, then the desk, and slowly knelt down in front of the one that Bonnie had simply called ‘Mr. Pig’.

“Hamm,” he said softly. “Is that you?”

The piggybank turned weary, dark eyes onto the cowboy. One of his ears had been fractured at the base, and one leg had faced a similar fate; he was pockmarked with dents and chips. Blue paint streaked like some sick emblem across one of his rounded sides, and his cork had blackened with misuse in his belly.

“Woody?” His voice had gone slightly hushed, nowhere near the confident pig that Woody remembered. “Well, I never expected this.” A soft chuckle, but it sounded hollow, chinking on his insides.

“What happened?” Woody cupped Hamm’s face, fingers feeling the little chips but trying not to linger on them, then stroked the ear that remained. He could feel his hands trembling, the sensation like his stuffing was being torn out of him. “Hamm... what happened to you?”

Hamm sighed. The light in his eyes dimmed. “So much... they need you, Sheriff. They need you back.”

 

Then he fell silent. Panic flared in Woody’s chest as he patted Hamm’s cheek, shook him so hard that he rattled against the table and almost fell over, repeated his name over and over again. “Hamm. Hamm! Come back to me!”

But the light in the pig’s eyes had gone, and even the next day when Bonnie presented the fixed and cleaned piggy-bank to the room, some of his worst dents covered with silver and gold stars (“Because they’re special band-aids that can make him _fly_ too!”), it did not come back. He just sat there, unresponsive, unmoving, like one of the books or the nightlight or the craft pieces that he was surrounded with. That night, Woody crept out of bed again and went to sit next to the pig, his cheek against Hamm’s cool flank, remembering all the years that they had sat and talked and bickered in Andy’s room, and had he had tear ducts he was sure that he would have cried.

“What’s the story, cowboy?” came a voice from behind him.

Woody started, turned round, then saw Dolly and sighed, leaning back against Hamm again. “He was... he was Andy’s toy. We were all Andy’s toys.”

“He came from your old owner?”

All that he could do this time was nod, sitting still as if listening for some toy heartbeat, a couple of the stickers already having fallen off and fluttered to the table. Dolly knelt down opposite, watching him intently with those sewn-on eyes.

“I thought you said that they were at Sunnyside,” she added.

“They were.”

It came out little more than a whisper. He remembered the cheers as the box opened and they were seen, remembered shaking of hands and hugging and laughter. Bright colours and brighter smiles. And now Hamm... sleeps. Let the word be sleeps. Woody ran one hand over the cool ceramic, yearning for a voice to tell him off for being so sentimental, to shake him off and ask what did Bonnie think she was doing with these stickers. But nothing came.

For a while the two of them sat in silence, the room given a slightly green cast by the nightlight that nestled next to Bonnie’s bed. Then Woody’s expression hardened and he rose to his feet, hands flexing at his sides as if he was ready for the draw. Dolly watched him rise, seeing what she had seen before only in rare moments in their games and stories, or when Woody talked.

The Sheriff was back.

“And I’m going back there to find them.”


	2. Chapter 2

It should have been simple to return. Hide in the mother’s handbag, wait until she reached work, then sneak free to spend the night at Sunnyside and talk to his friends again. Nothing more complicated than any of the messes that he had found himself in before, that was certain. And yet it was with trepidation that Woody nestled into the depths of Mrs. Anderson’s handbag, waiting as she dropped off Bonnie at kindergarten before continuing on to work, changing from the CD of children’s songs to the radio as she did so. Woody gritted his teeth through her muted complaints about traffic jams, then huddled as deep down as he could when the bag was lifted up and he felt it swung over a shoulder.  
  
Then it was a matter of waiting, fidgeting, feeling something that he supposed was close to nauseous until he was able to peep out of the bags and see the reception area clear. Gritting his teeth, Woody hopped out of the bag and slipped into the back of the desk, waiting for night to fall by curling up and listening to the laughter and shouting of the children in the distance. Surely what had happened to Hamm had to be a mistake, an accident. His hands curled into fists at the thought of his old friend, and fire settled in Woody’s eyes again as he waited for the dark to come.  
  
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, night came. Woody slipped out from his hiding place and crawled up the bookcase into the false ceiling. The building had gone quiet, eerily quiet for one which he knew had so many toys, and he did not want to draw attention to himself by opening doors at this time of night.  
  
He picked his way over the creaking polystyrene boards, through the tangle of wires and tubes, occasionally lifting the edge of one to peer beneath. All that he could see was darkness, darkness in every room, and confusion settled more and more firmly into his features as he finally found the room where he had left his friends before, with the built castle and shelves and shelves of toys, and slipped out onto the top of one of the bookshelves there.  
  
Silence. Woody paused, looking around him. It was difficult to see in the gloom, the night sky outside clouded and only the vague light of one torch visible through the window. Then a glimmer caught his attention, and he craned his neck to see a glow-worm toy nestled at the foot of one of the sets of shelves, silhouetted figures around him. His heart gave a leap as he recognised the distinctive outstretched wings of Buzz Lightyear, walking back and forth with his arms loosely linked behind his back, and Woody quickly began to scramble down the bookcase.  
  
He slipped from part way down and tumbled to the floor with a soft clatter. Breathing curses, Woody was pulling himself to his feet as a red ‘laser’ was centred on his chest, glinting off his badge. “Halt! Who goes there?”  
  
“Cool it, Buzz,” he hissed, swatting at the red dot as if to wave it away. Buzz came towards him, framed by the light of the glow-worm, then stopped as he came close enough for the two toys to see each other’s faces. Buzz’s helmet was lowered, a deep scratch running down one side of his face and blurring out one eye; his expression softened but fell as he caught sight of Woody.  
  
“You should not have returned, Woody,” he said softly.  
  
Woody looked at him in horror. “Buzz, what do you—”  
  
He got no further, throwing up one arm as a bright torch was shone into his face. Buzz started to protest, but was cut off by something that Woody could not see as his eyes tried to adjust. Finally the light was turned away from him, and he looked up to see the yellow dump truck, backed towards him. His eyes travelled slowly upwards, past brown boots, cow-hide chaps, a white blouse. Finally he reached the figure’s face, surrounded by red hair cut above the shoulder, the colour worn from her cheeks to reveal pallour beneath.

“Jessie!” He cried, before he could stop himself. He ran towards the dump truck, about to jump up onto it, when a jointed plastic snake spun itself around him and held him tightly in place. “Hey, let go!” Woody tried to squirm loose, turning to glare at the snake, but received a violent hiss in return and was shocked into stillness. Turning back to Jessie, he caught her eyes, and was horrified by the stillness that he saw there. As if the light had gone out of her as well. “Jessie?”  
  
She stared at him for a long moment, then turned to Buzz, who was still standing with pain written on his face, shoulders slumped. A flicker of her hand, and he crossed to stand in front of her, dropping to one knee. Her eyes returned to Woody, green and glassy, as she spoke in a cold, flat voice quite unlike what he remembered.  
  
“Where did you find the intruder, Buzz?”  
  
“Jessie, please,” Buzz began, but she snapped her fingers and he flinched. “I found Woody here,” he said.  
  
“He is not Woody. Woody is dead. You know this.”  
  
“Hey, wait!” Woody protested. “I’m not dead. I’m—”  
  
“Silence.” It was not a shout, not a cry, simply a word that cut his voice from his mouth and left him looking helplessly up at the cowgirl standing, hands on her hips, before him. “How long has he been here?”  
  
“Only a moment. Let him go, now, please.”  
  
“Buzz, what—”  
  
“ _Silence_.” Her voice was harder this time, her eyes fixed on him. “Intruders are not to be tolerated. Take him to the lockdown.”  
  
Buzz stayed kneeling for a moment, then in a strained voice he said, “Yes, Jessie,” and rose to his feet. Woody looked at him speechlessly as the space ranger walked over, took hold of his once-friend’s arm, and steered him away towards one of the dark corners of the room. He didn’t glow the way he used to. Woody went to turn, to look as the sound of the dump truck moving again caught his attention, but Buzz said softly: “Don’t look back, cowboy.”  
  
“What is going _on_?” hissed Woody as they reached a door in the corner of the room. Buzz reached up and rapped a short pattern; the handle turned, a pair of eyes peered round, then the door was pulled slowly open and Woody felt himself being dragged inside. “Buzz, what—”  
  
“Please, Woody, don’t ask,” he replied dully. He met Woody’s eyes just for a moment, then turned into the dark of the cupboard to call: “Barbie, you know what to do.”  
  
Then before Woody could say anything more, Buzz released him and left the cupboard, closing the door behind him. Darkness fell, and for the first time Woody began to feel truly afraid.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hello?” Woody called into the darkness. The echo of his voice was muffled by shelves, clutter, dust. It felt oddly reminiscent of the attic; to think so was comforting, but he didn’t quite believe it. He cleared his throat and cupped his hands around his mouth as there were sounds of shuffling, a clanking note among them. “Hell-oh?”  
  
The light clicked on, and for the second time Woody started and flinched. This time, though, it was more gentle, coming from a flickering shaded bulb far above. Then, as his eyes began to gather details, he started to recognise things: shelves, yes, but with toys upon them. Here a trembling plush dinosaur, here a patched squeaking toy carrot peering over the edge of the shelf... he gazed in astonishment, until footsteps on the floor with him pulled him back.  
  
“Woody? Is that really you?”  
  
Barbie was looking at him in astonishment. Of all the toys so far, she looked the most like he remembered, one of her hands a little mangled and her hair a little tangled at the ends, but still recognisably Barbie in the same clothes she had worn two years before.  
  
“Yes, Barbie, it’s me,” he replied, putting his hands to his chest as if to reassure himself of that same fact. “What happened here? Jessie—”  
  
“It’s complicated,” said Barbie, and for a moment her lips trembled. Then she swallowed. “And your arrival might have made it worse.”  
  
“Hey, baby, who’s this groovy fellow?” Ken walked out behind her and looped his arm around her waist. He was still wearing the charming smile and nice clothes: white slacks, a pink polo, a turquoise sweater wrapped around his shoulders. But the slacks looked grubby, and more startling than that was the thick band-aid around his neck, so that his eyes moved but his head stayed facing firmly forwards. He frowned slightly as he caught sight of Woody, then the smile bounced back. “Do I recognise you, cowboy?”  
  
“It’s Woody,” Woody replied grimly. There wasn’t a toy he’d seen so far that hadn’t been damaged in some way. For the first time in many months, his head felt bare and exposed. “Barbie, Buzz called out to you. What’s going on here?”  
  
“Come on in, Woody,” said Barbie. “I’m sorry it’s not the dream house anymore. But we’ve got some chairs back here.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“I’ll explain in a minute,” she said, and this time there was a note of pleading in her voice. Woody fell silent and followed her into one of the large boxes at the back of the cupboard, into which had been cut a door that he had to stoop slightly to fit through. The inside of the box had been coloured in brightly, a wind-up torch shining down through the ceiling, and mismatched plastic furniture had been added in what Woody presumed was an attempt to make it look more homely. Barbie and Ken sat down on a bench that had been backed up against the wall to act like a couch, and Woody glanced around the furniture options before going for the largest of the chairs. It was still slightly to small for him, and he slumped with his elbows on his knees to level his gaze onto Barbie.  
  
Ken had taken Barbie’s battered hand in his and was gently stroking the back of it, his whole body twisted slightly so that he could look at her. She looked down at her knees for a moment as if summoning something, then nodded very slightly and looked up to Woody once again.  
  
“I’m sorry, Woody,” she said. Her voice was soft, trembling. “We never expected to see you again. And with everything that’s... well, a lot has happened.”  
  
“Tell me,” he said softly, and though Barbie had only ever been Molly’s toy she knew the leader that the cowboy had once been. Her expression seemed to soften, some pain to ease, as he gestured for her to talk to him.  
  
But her voice came out at the same deadpan. “We aren’t what we were. None of us. Most of us are broken by now. Hamm is gone, now, just a couple of days ago, and Buzz has given up hope even though he was reset. And Jessie...”  
  
“Tell me about Jessie.”

Barbie wrapped both of her hands around Ken’s. “Lotso bought your hat to us. We thought... he let everyone believe that you were dead. Never let the truth out. Buzz was the only one who thought that you were still alive, once he came back, and, well... he’s Buzz. He always believed.  
  
“Something in Jessie shut down that day, though. The hat was right in front of her. I can’t imagine what it must have been like. Slinky told me that she stayed awake all night, just... watching it. That was the first step, I suppose.”  
  
Woody swallowed, whispered: “The first step?”  
  
“To what you saw tonight.”  
  
He remembered the cold gaze that she had settled on him, like the antique dolls with their glass eyes that he had seen once, so long ago that it was fuzzy and dream-like now. They may not have been real, he and Jessie and Bullseye, but they had been made of fabric and paint and had held warmth, and moved, and talked. And she had stood stiff and stern before him.  
  
“What is Jessie now?” he asked, and it was not until the words left his lips that he realised that he had been going to say them. The question left a hole in his chest.  
  
“That’s simple,” said Barbie softly. “She’s our owner now.” She turned her right hand, the one he had thought unblemished, outwards. Now that Woody could see clearly, he could see scratched into the plastic lines, lines that made a name that should have read Jessie were it not for the fact that it was impossible.  
  
“Toys don’t own toys,” said Woody.  
  
“She says that it means we’ll never be without an owner,” said Barbie. “It means we can all be together, forever.”  
  
“I – oh, this is just nonsense.” His patience wore out, and Woody got to his feet again, giving a dramatic wave of his arms that probably would have worked better had he not smacked the ceiling and sent the whole room rattling. “I’m going to go over and talk to her and—”  
  
“It’s been two years, Woody,” said Barbie, and he stopped in his tracks, just one step from the door, hand rising towards the paperclip-and-button door handle.  
  
His hand clenched into a fist. “I knew her for ten.”  
  
“And you’ve been around, what? Fifty, sixty? Bullseye wasn’t too clear on the whole thing, but I know it’s a long time.”  
  
Memories like ghosts. The attic. Another owner, not Andy, almost Andy. Being propped up on a high shelf where he could see a baby in the crib and look down curiously. When televisions were rare, when there was the radio and record players and he was the most complex and loved toy in the world. A time when the world was simpler, and toys lasted longer. But an old time.  
  
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s been a long time.”  
  
Barbie was watching him carefully, her bright blue eyes seeming older than he had once known. “And these two years have been long as well, Woody. This is Jessie’s toy box now, and we belong to her. And if you talk to the old toys... perhaps it isn’t all that much better than it used to be here.”


	4. Chapter 4

Silence reigned in the butterfly room. The hushed sound of sleep, or attempts to sleep. Buzz slowly crossed the floor, glancing around him at the dull outlines of furniture and boxes in the dimmed moonlight, to the closed vent on the far wall. The screws had already been removed, and it was not difficult for him to pull it open, wincing at the squeak of the rarely-used metal, and step inside.  
  
“Come on up, Buzz,” Jessie drawled. There was no-one else who would dare to enter this place.  
  
He didn’t reply, but his feet clanged on the floor of the vent as he made his way to the junction and turned right, where they’d closed off one of the areas a long time ago. Every day they charged the solar light that they had taken from the garden, and every night, if Jessie wanted, she would bring it in here to light up the makeshift room.  
  
There were various items, set around the room on plastic or cardboard pillars. Pride of place though, if the turn of phrase could be excused, was the hat.  
  
It had been there since the beginning. This had been for it in the first place, after all, occasionally broken with the sound of Jessie sobbing, echoing down the tunnel. They had pretended not to hear. Now, as Buzz entered again, Jessie was standing with her back to him and her arms folded, the light from the solar lamp silhouetting her. Buzz walked in, hands linked behind him, and stood slightly behind her right shoulder. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the tight expression on her face.  
  
“I didn’t expect to see that tonight,” she said finally, her voice quieter than he had heard in a long time but no softer. “I never expected to see that.”  
  
“Jessie, he _is_ –”  
  
“No,” she said flatly. “He is not.” She reached out and stroked the vinyl of the hat in front of her, still shining brown, kept dust-free in here. “We know what happened, Buzz. We know...”  
  
Her voice cracked, and Buzz reached out to draw her to him, tenderly, hands brushing smoothly over her back. Jessie bent slightly at the knees to rest her head upon his, her eyes lolling closed, arms draping over his shoulders. She smelt of paint and dust and weariness, but she was still so light that she was barely a pressure in his arms. His hand brushed over her back, and she stiffened as it ran over the hole in her back, where her pullstring had once lain.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.  
  
In reply she cupped his face with her hands and kissed him, and closing his eyes he could believe that this was another place. A place where the slightest shift of his feet as he leant into Jessie didn’t echo softly around the room to press in on them once again. But then Jessie’s hold on his cheeks became a little fiercer, her fingers hard against his plastic, and there was something more desperate to her kiss.  
  
He ran his hands down her sides, over the thin ridges, and she sighed as he scooped his hands around her buttocks and pulled them closer together. One of her hands slid down and ran over his chest plate, picking out the lines of his buttons without pressing them heavily. He could feel her hips pressing against him, feel an ache deep in his chest, a desire for the Jessie that he remembered and not the one whose short hair he now stroked with one hand.  
  
She broke the kiss, tilted her lips to whisper in his ear. “I want to see my name,” she said.  
  
He hoped that he misheard. Lump rising in his throat, his eyes still closed, Buzz replied: “Jessie. Jessie.” Fingers caressing the silver button in the centre of her chest, he tried to ignore the fingers creeping round his back, brushing against the edges of his battery compartment.  
  
“ _See_ it, Buzz,” she whispered, and the broken desire in her voice almost bought him to his knees.

Bowing his head, he dropped to one knee, leaning his hands upon it to keep himself upright. So long as his eyes stared closed, he could pretend that he could not hear her cross to the back of the room, retrieve the small screwdriver secreted there, return to him with it. He could pretend that he did not feel the removal of the screw, that he did not wish there were tears to take the burning from his eyes. He could pretend that he did not feel her fingers running over the inside of him, the batteries rolling slightly in her grip, and he muffled a grunt between gritted teeth as her fingers touched his switch, just for an instant, before moving to the inside of the casing to where her name had been carved.  
  
Carved where only she could see it, where only she would ever touch it. She had made it clear what would happen to any other toy who tried to open Buzz’s battery compartment.  
  
He gave a shiver as her fingers traced her own name, then a panting sigh of relief as the compartment was closed again, the screw replaced, his back made whole and impenetrable and secure once again. A moment’s quiet, Jessie walking away to place the screwdriver out of his sight, then her feet returning and her hands running over his back, light kisses on his shoulders. Fighting not to tremble, Buzz let her kisses and gentle caresses continue until he turned, pulling her down to her knees with him, kissing her on the mouth again.  
  
It helped, somehow, to pin her to the metal floor, the warmth of her cloth against the cold aluminium a reminder that perhaps, just perhaps, there was warmth in her still. The way that she gasped and made little muted moans as he kissed her all over, his heavier plastic form holding her down, hands locked around her wrists until he cupped her chin again and kissed her, over and over, his knee rocking between her thighs until she whimpered and shuddered and her eyes closed with a beautiful, blissful look coming across her face.  
  
For a while they lay in the darkness, Jessie with her eyes closed, Buzz drinking in her expression and parted lips and the way that she was lying soft and _his_ beneath him once again. But then her eyes opened, the moment passed, and he had to turn away as she got to her feet.  
  
“We should go,” she said softly. Buzz nodded from where he sat still on the floor, legs stretched out in front of him, helmet lowered as it always was nowadays unless for some reason he needed to go into the Caterpillar room.  
  
“I will confirm the security of the area before accompanying you,” he replied, crisply.  
  
Jessie paused in the entrance to their little chamber, then turned and placed her hand on his shoulder for just a moment. “Thank you, Space Ranger,” she said.  
  
Then he listened to her go, his head bowed, and waited until he heard the grate close before rising to his feet once again. His joints felt tight and dry, more so even than they often did nowadays, as he turned off the light, checked to ensure that their modifications to the area were still intact – they always had been, they always were – and exited himself, tightening up the vent to make sure that no-one else could enter the place that Jessie used to hold her memories.


	5. Chapter 5

“It started with Lotso,” Barbie said. She looked down from the high shelf on which they sat, watching Ken talk to the other toys down at floor level. Woody had wanted to climb up, had helped her to do so, and had reached up to the ceiling in all corners to try and find some crack that he might be able to force open and use as a way out. It was a surprise to find nothing – and then again, those who once belonged to Andy had often learnt from him how to move around in human buildings – and a disappointment. That was when they had said at the edge instead, looking down onto the floor far below now.  
  
“Lotso? That old bear?”  
  
“Yes, him. We didn’t realise it when we got here, but he...” she trailed off, looking down and kicking her legs slightly into the air. “He ran Sunnyside, Woody. He controlled them all, us all. He kept people in the Butterfly room, where the children play with us... well, you can see how they play with us.”  
  
A pang in Woody’s chest. Andy had always been such a gentle child; Bonnie was more than gentle, was so careful with them and even bought toys home to fix. But he had been to school with Andy, and seen other toys, and of course he remembered Sid.  
  
Barbie could see the silence in his eyes. “He controlled us, Woody. He controlled the strongest toys, punished the weakest. And... he took Buzz from us.”  
  
“Buzz?” Woody whipped round. “But he—”  
  
“We fixed him,” she said, quickly. “Jessie saw to it, eventually. He’s got... this switch, in his back, and when they change it he turns back to what he used to be. But Lotso used him like a soldier, to ensure that we were locked up at night, that we couldn’t talk to each other, to... well, to guard us. He didn’t recognise us, any of us.” A sigh. “We feared it might last forever.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“Jessie. She did save us, when all is said and done.” Barbie rubbed her hands on her upper arms, though the cupboard remained comfortably warm. “She started making these little rapping sounds – drove Buzz mad, but he couldn’t understand it. Bullseye would tap back. The rest of us didn’t understand what they were doing.  
  
“Then one day, suddenly, they both just... disappeared. We couldn’t find them anywhere, even Slinky or Hamm, and by the time that Buzz got out of the sink he was furious. Lotso had the whole building searched, and the playground, even up in the ceiling. Everywhere, they thought. But they just couldn’t find her. Even now, she won’t say where she went, though Ken thinks she might have used the vents. A toy nearly escaped that way once, years ago.”  
  
“Wait, wait,” Woody waved his hands. “What about Lotso? And Buzz? Why were you locked up in the first place?”  
  
That part of the story came out more uncertainly, with asides and recommendations that he should ask Ken, but Woody stood firm to get as much of the tale from Barbie as possible. She told him about the rules, about the way that Lotso had once run Sunnyside, about the gang that he had used in order to ensure that was how things stayed. She didn’t know why, she said, didn’t know how; Jessie had never cared to ask, in the darker days that had come.  
  
“Why didn’t you talk to him?” Woody asked.  
  
“Talk? There was no talk, Woody,” replied Barbie, with a slightly hysterical laugh. “He’d owned this place for years, don’t you understand? We didn’t matter. Either we learnt to follow his rules, or he could have us destroyed or thrown out or locked up forever. No, most of us were thinking only of escaping, of getting back to Andy. But then time passed, and we realised that Andy would be at college now, that we didn’t have him to go back to... and then most of us didn’t know what we were going to do.”  
  
Except Jessie. Woody still the words on his tongue that wanted to say that perhaps, just perhaps, if _he_ had talked to Lotso the story would have been different. That you could lead without owning. All right, so Andy’s room hadn’t been perfect and there had been arguments, but they had been _friends_ and everything had worked out in the end. Staff meetings. Speaking. Conversation. Games. And for thirteen years and more, all told, it had worked.

He wondered if he could have done something if he had come back. If he had known. And he thought of Jessie locked away in that box, night after night, and just for a moment darkness closed around his mind and he understood.  
  
“It was around that time that Jessie disappeared,” Barbie was continuing. He dragged himself back into the moment to look round to her, her words still addressed down, softly, as if speaking to herself. “We were scared, at first, that she had run away – happy if she had escaped, of course, but worried about what might happen to her out there. But then... things started happening.  
  
“It was Twitch, first. You know, the one that looked a bit like a praying mantis?”  
  
“I don’t remember,” murmured Woody. Barbie shrugged.  
  
“It doesn’t matter. One night he disappeared, too. Lotso presumed that it was someone from the Caterpillar room that had done it – there were some newer toys by then, as well as us – and he was angry with Buzz. But none of us knew. Apparently...”  
  
She paused and swallowed, raising one trembling hand to her lips. Woody reached out and patted her shoulder gently, the way he had done before with worried toys, and then rubbed back and forth across her shoulders for a moment or two before she managed to gather herself and speak again.  
  
“They found his head. It had been put on the staff, left in the middle of the sandbox, and he... he was gone. Lotso was furious, increased the security, sent some toys from the Butterfly room to the Caterpillar, saying that he didn’t trust them. We had Sparks – a robot toy, you won’t know him either – guarding us as well, and from then on Buzz was in the Caterpillar room twenty-four seven. Except when they took him to destroy that Zurg that was donated.  
  
“Slink disappeared next. One of the children took him outside, during recess, but never bought him back in. We realised that night that your hat was gone, as well. Jessie had kept it hidden in her box in the shelves until then, but we don’t know how long before that it had been missing. It was then, I think, that Lotso decided that we were behind something.  
  
“We didn’t know, I swear we didn’t.” She turned her blue eyes towards him, finally, and for a moment he was sure that they shone with tears. Then he realised that it was just the bulb, high above, glinting on them both. “But they interrogated us. All of us.”  
  
Woody drew his breath in sharply.  
  
“Buzz... did most of the work. But Ken was there as well, to ask the questions, and Lotso was just... watching, not saying anything. They had a heater, as well.” Barbie was shaking at the memory, and he pulled her closer to his soft, fabric side, feeling the hard prods of her elbows into his chest. “I don’t know whether or not they believed us. But they took Rex and the Aliens to the Butterfly Room, to split us up.  
  
“Chunk went next. He just disappeared, they never found any pieces or anything. He was this rock-like toy, another of Lotso’s heavies. And then, a few days later, they found Sparks with all of his insides pulled out and strewn across the floor. Three of Lotso’s followers, Woody, just gone. She did that to them.”  
  
“You know it was Jessie?”  
  
“Not at the time. But we know now; she told everyone, made sure that we knew. And I think that maybe Lotso knew, or at least knew that it was one of us. That was when he threw Ken out, into the Caterpillar Room with nothing more than the clothes that he was wearing. He said that Ken still had feelings for me.”  
  
Woody thought of the toy far below, his head held on with a Band-Aid. How much worse must it be when your limbs could not be simply sewn back on again. As Barbie shifted out from his grasp, he reached up to brush the red stitches on his right shoulder, the mark that Andy had left on him so many years ago.  
  
“Ken stayed. I couldn’t believe that he did, I was so happy to have him back. He talked about running away, said that he might know a way out. Through the vents.”  
  
“Had he not told Lotso about the vents?” Woody asked.

Barbie shook her head. “He said that he’d always wanted to keep them to himself, just in case he ever wanted to leave that way. He didn’t realise then that Jessie was using them. And one night we swapped boxes with Hamm, because he’d told us that there was a hole in the back of his box, and we climbed out the back of the cupboard and undid the screws on the vent cover, but we waited until the night after that to leave through it. We were so sure that they’d find where we’d gone.”  
  
“And did they?”  
  
“They never had the chance,” she said, with a slightly brittle laugh. “We were only at the first crossing when Slink dropped down out of nowhere, put a paw over my mouth and carried me off. I was dropped in front of Jessie and she told me that if I screamed, we’d all be caught. Moments later, Ken was beside me as well, and we were both being tied up. Bullseye was there as well, and I suppose she must have been using Slink to move them both around.  
  
“At first, she thought we were Lotso’s. We had to plead that we weren’t, and she barely believed us, but Ken told her all about the security and the new toys that Lotso had frightened into following him, and I think she finally came round. Not that she fully trusts us even now, as you can see. This is the only place that we’re fit to guard.  
  
“In response, she told us that she was almost ready to get rid of Lotso once and for all. She was just waiting for the right moment.”


	6. Chapter 6

A pattern of rapping on the door below interrupted before Woody could say anything more. They both froze and looked down as Ken signalled to one of the toys to open the door. A jack-in-the-box on one of the shelves bounced across and flicked the handle down, and the door slid open a couple of paces. Buzz appeared in the gap; Woody held his tongue as the space ranger exchanged a few words with Ken, then called: “Barbie! You’re wanted in the Butterfly Room!”  
  
“Here, I’ll help,” Woody began, but Barbie put one hand on his knee and shook her head.  
  
“No, Woody. You stay here. It’s... safer that way.”  
  
After what he had heard, he could not bring himself to reply, and picked his legs up to slide back out of sight as he heard Barbie climbing down the shelves, crossing the floor, and finally the door closing behind her. They were left to the artificial light from above once again, and the clattering muted noise from below.  
  
Woody wrapped his arms around his legs and hugged them to his chest, resting his chin upon his knees. Feelings he had not felt in years, which he had perhaps never felt, swirled in him, tightened his throat and made him feel cold. From far below he could hear Ken saying something about Caterpillar duty, but the words drifted by him as he tried to summon memories of what had gone before, of games in Andy’s room, of everything that had once been.  
  
It seemed to be harder than he once recalled.  
  
Stooping to avoid the ceiling, he got to his feet and walked around the top shelf again, between pots of dried-up paint and over crackling old paper. As he and Barbie had seen earlier, there were indeed no gaps, not even for the smallest of toys to creep through. The door was locked by a toy outside most of the time, she said, though they could open it from the inside when it was unlocked.  
  
Safe. No toddlers in here, no chance to be damaged. But still imprisoned. A perfect padded cell.  
  
Frustrated, Woody sat down again, putting his face in his hands. He’d tried approaching one or two of the other toys, but they seemed frightened of him; Ken just smiled in that way he always did and refused to answer any questions. At the beginning of the night, before speaking to him, Barbie had spent quite some time hushing her charges to sleep, and now there was general peace in the room. But he had heard them whispering, sometimes his name but more usually, ‘the cowboy’ or ‘the sheriff’. And he knew, now, that of all the toys whom he had once known, only Barbie was here.  
  
He sat among the soft dust of the top shelf, and looked down towards the safe little world that these toys had tried to make for themselves. Wondering what it would take to tear it apart.

Barbie did not come back that night. The rising of the sun outside, the arrival of the adult workers and the scramble to turn off the light and hide in the depths of the cupboard in the desperate hope of not being found did not go unnoticed by Woody, but it was Barbie’s disappeared that he was more concerned with. Eventually, despite the constant noise from outside, he dropped down from shelf to shelf, until finally reaching the floor and looking round with increasing impatience for Ken.  
  
The doll turned out to be in the same box in which he had talked to Woody the night before, his smile now tight and his hands trembling as he straightened furniture and curtains stuck over painted-on windows.  
  
“Ken,” Woody said, noting the jump. “What are you doing?”  
  
“I’m just, you know, passing time.” Ken turned, with his whole body. His eyes were glassy. How many toys had gone missing from here before? “What’s got your interest, cowboy?”  
  
“I’m worried about Barbie.”  
  
“She’ll be back.” Ken turned away, straightened the curtains again. They had been threaded onto a drinking straw that served for a rail, though the cross-stitching along the bottom was a nice touch. “She always is.”  
  
Woody frowned. “She’s been gone before?”  
  
“Oh, yes. They like to... talk to her, sometimes.” Ken’s voice sounded unnaturally bright, even for a toy of his range. Woody had seen Kens, and other Barbies, at Andy’s school or friends’ houses over the years, and he knew that they tended to talk in a manner such as this. But not in this situation; even they had shown emotion. “See how we’re doing in here. You know.”  
  
“I’m sure I do,” he replied. Perhaps just lied. “When will she be back?”  
  
There was just a moment’s pause. “Usually she’s back by morning, but sometimes she needs to wait until evening. It’s dangerous to move during the day.”  
  
“Very well. I’ll speak to her then. I’ve got things I need to do.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Please, Buzz,” she whispered. “Help me.”  
  
He looked at her, something dead behind his eyes. They read: you know that I can’t. And he was right. Barbie closed her eyes in defeat and turned her head downwards, blocking out the muffled sounds of Buzz’s footsteps leaving.  
  
She’d done it all _right_. She’d been in the Caterpillar Room when she was needed, and she’d kept all of them calm in the lockdown, and she’d done what she was told. She had helped Jessie at the beginning by telling them about the new toys that Lotso had recruited!  
  
She had believed, like the others, that it would make them free.  
  
Barbie let out a muffled whimper, pressing her plastic lips together to try and avoid it slipping out. The dream house was still beautiful, still lush and furnished, but it had been many months since she or Ken had been in here to be played with. She wrapped her hands around her knees and tried to draw them towards her chest, but the plastic did not bend very far and she was left hunched over, sitting beneath the window in the living room.  
  
She didn’t look round when the door opened; she didn’t need to. In her mind there were the click of spurs, and she had to think forcefully of cloth and plastic. Jessie was a little taller than Barbie or Ken or Buzz, and she had to remove her hat to enter, though she could stand up straight once she was in the room. There was light coming in through the windows, and she could hear the chatter of the toys outside, but for a moment Jessie simply stood, silent, watching her.  
  
Biting her lip, she told herself not to speak, not to be the one to break the silence. She kept her eyes turned to the ground at the sound of feet crossing the floor, the scraping of a chair being drawn back, Jessie sitting down. Silence held for a while longer.  
  
“There’s a newcomer in the lockdown,” said Jessie finally. Her voice was soft, far softer than it had once been. There were some of them who wished for her temper.  
  
Barbie said nothing.  
  
“A stranger to these parts,” Jessie continued. “A renegade. He didn’t come in the usual way. Am I right?”  
  
Still not daring words, she finally nodded.  
  
“Of course. And you understand why we left him with you, don’t you, Barbie? Somewhere nice and safe where he won’t be— isn’t in danger. Somewhere that people can talk to him, and make him understand how things are here. And you’re good at that, aren’t you?”  
  
“Yes,” she whispered.  
  
“You’re _very_ good at it. Because I know how lovely and safe people feel in the lockdown, and how much everyone there likes you.”  
  
Her voice was still so mellow, so steady. If you didn’t know who was speaking it would have been relieving; even as it was, Barbie found herself slowly looking upwards, brushing her fringe away from her face, to see the distant smile on the cowgirl’s lips.  
  
“We do appreciate your work, Barbie, I hope that you know that. I appreciate your work.” Jessie reached up to tuck back a strand of her hair with the others; unbraided, it was more difficult to control. Her hat sat on the floor beside her, shining red. “But you see, I just wanted to ask you a little favour.”  
  
Fear flickered in Barbie’s eyes.  
  
“Now, I don’t expect you to do it for nothing,” said Jessie, and her voice was almost a caress. “How would you and Ken like some presents, hmm? Some of the things from this house?”  
  
“That’s really not necessary...”  
  
“Buzz,” Jessie called over her shoulder. “Bring it on in.”  
  
Barbie fell silent again as the space ranger entered the room, clothes on their hangers draped over his arms. Jessie stood up and crossed to take them from him, dangling one outfit from each hand and looking them over, one at a time.  
  
“Which ones are these, then?”  
  
“The Robert Best 10 Year Tribute dress,” she whispered, “with embroidery and sequin embellishments.”  
  
The dress glimmered in the light from beyond the room, powder blue, fitted, with a ruffled fluted skirt and golden embroidery snaking over the bodice, pink and iridescent sequins fluttering around. She could only presume that the opera-length gloves and matching heeled shoes were still waiting somewhere.  
  
“And for Ken?”  
  
“The Prince Daniel of Swan Lake outfit with matching crown and swan companion.”

Buzz quirked an eyebrow at the knowledge Barbie seemed to have gained from Ken, but said nothing. Barbie was still staring, transfixed and part in fear, at the beautiful clothes when she realised that Jessie was sitting on the floor in front of her, cross-legged, something close to earnestness in her eyes.  
  
“Exactly. You see, Barbie? We’ve been gathering outfits for you, as well as for Ken.” Jessie smoothed the dress that now lay across her lap, sparkling, her green eyes fixed on Barbie’s expression. “And we’ve been keeping them safe here. Because you know how the Caterpillar room can be.  
  
She nodded, wordlessly.  
  
“And you don’t want to be there forever, do you Barbie?”  
  
Silence.  
  
“After all, I’m sure that there’s no-one who could run the lockdown like you could, but you’d far rather be here in the Butterfly room, I’m sure.  
  
“In the Dream House, with all your things. And with Ken. All nice and safe and happy.  
  
“All you’d need is someone else to run the lockdown for you, wouldn’t you?”  
  
Barbie felt as if she was going to cry; against her volition, she reached out to brush her fingers against the perfect, crisp ruffles of the dress. Suddenly the Dream House seemed only empty, nothing more sinister than that. It was safe, after all, in the lockdown. Secure.  
  
A perfect padded cell.  
  
“Do you want to come back, Barbie?” Jessie asked softly. “Do you want to come back to us?”  
  
And her voice promised safety.


	8. Chapter 8

The evening did not come abruptly to the Daycare. First the children would leave in swirls of chatter and loud voices; the childminders were to follow after, and even then the cleaners would be later still before it finally fell silent. The toys came cautiously from their shelves and boxes, and Barbie sat with her head bowed on the rear of the dump truck as she was returned to the Caterpillar Room. As the door was opened, she slipped the white gloves from her hands and tucked them into her skirt, smoothing down the fabric over them. There was a rustling of attention, whispers in the darkness, as she slipped to the floor and was escorted by Buzz to the Lockdown once again.  
  
He rapped at the door, that little prescribed pattern that made her shudder, and a long purple tentacle uncoiled from higher up to insert the key into the lock, turn it and draw away again. Then the door was pushed open from the inside and darkness opened up, no figures braving the entrance.  
  
“It’s okay,” she called. “It’s me. Turn on the lights.”  
  
There were rustles of relief, and the light turned on, swaying yellow-white above them. Ken appeared from their box-home, relief across his handsome features as he rushed to embrace her, and she almost missed the hand that curled around the door to prevent it from closing fully behind him. Her foot popped upwards as she flung her arms around Ken’s neck, hearing him whisper: “I’m so glad that you’re back.”  
  
“Of course I’m back,” she said brightly, drawing back slightly but keeping her hands on his shoulders. “It just took a little longer than usual.”  
  
Buzz cleared his throat behind them. Barbie turned cautiously, to see him standing with his hands folded behind him once again. “It has been decided that there will be no Caterpillar duty tomorrow,” he said, voice carrying with ease through the cupboard. “Furthermore, a rearrangement of facilities is being considered this weekend, and your presence will therefore be expected at the meeting on Sunday, at sunrise. Registers _will_ be taken. Thank you.”  
  
With that he turned smartly, and a tentacle reached round once again to pull the door closed once again. It clicked shut, Barbie embraced Ken impulsively once again, and toys began to creep out from their hiding holes and places of safety. A couple of little tin toys, hidden away from the brutality of the Caterpillar children, hopped out from beneath the lowest shelf and over to bob against Barbie’s legs, where she stroked their heads gently and murmured to them. Sometimes it was hardest on the ones that couldn’t talk.  
  
Talk started up, or clinking sounds, and she relaxed slightly as the toys returned to normal or at least calmed down from their fear. She was sure, though, that the talk of the next thirty-six hours would be of the rearrangement, the chance for some of them to get out, the fear some of them had of getting out.  
  
She did not see, this time, the door to the box-home open and the cowboy step out. His emergence found her first as a silence, then the little tin toys shifting behind her legs, and finally she looked up and Ken turned as Woody strode into the centre of the cupboard, grim-faced. There was something hard and angry in his eyes.  
  
“This place isn’t right,” he said flatly.  
  
“Woody,” Barbie said, desperation creeping into her voice, “please don’t do anything foolish. We’re _safe_ here.”  
  
“Safe?” And now the cowboy rounded on her, anger in his eyes, pointing one finger in her direction. Barbie went to shy away, but was stopped by the tin toys cowering at her feet. “Safe locked in a room? Where are the toys I used to know, Barbie? Where have they gone? And what’s to say that you won’t be next?”  
  
Jessie’s calm promises. In all that Jessie did, she never broke her word.  
  
“You’re all living on a cliff edge, just waiting to fall,” Woody snapped. His voice was raised, head shining in the light from above. He went to advance on Barbie; Ken stepped in with a hand to the chest, but Woody pushed it aside contemptuously. He opened his mouth to speak again, but Barbie’s words came out close to a cry.  
  
“You’re scaring the little ones!”

It felt like nothing, like a foolish cry, but Woody stopped and looked around the small gathering that they had, the figures hiding half in shadow. Even without looking up, there were enough for him to soften.  
  
“How many of you are there?” he said abruptly.  
  
Barbie swallowed back tears. “About twenty-five. We don’t keep count the way they do outside.”  
  
“Outside?”  
  
“Hundreds.”  
  
The biggest toy box he had ever seen. In stores the toys sat quiet and motionless on the shelves, waiting for the touch of a human, waiting for an _owner_ to take them home and play with them. Waiting for life. And here sat hundreds of once-loved, twice-loved, never-loved toys, ownerless. Lost toys. From a pointing accusation, Woody’s hand curled into a fist, and his brow furrowed slightly.  
  
“This should be a place that we can live forever,” he said quietly. He didn’t notice that Barbie lifted one palm to her chest, over where her heart would be; he certainly would not have realised that it was the one with Jessie’s name carved into it.  
  
“We’re toys,” she replied. “Of course we live forever.”  
  
He seemed to realise that they had an audience, the toys gathered round to watch, and Barbie wanted to shrink away and hide as he suddenly spun, raised his arms, spoke up and projected his voice into the whole of the lockdown.  
  
“You stay in here because you think that you’re safe,” he called. “I know that. I understand. I’ve been in attics and cupboards and on shelves. But how long is it since you’ve been held by a child? Since you’ve felt the warmth of their touch and heard their laughter? You—” he pointed to a long plush snake, curled on a low shelf, who huddled back slightly at the picking out “—how long since you slithered through the undergrowth of a child’s imagination, since they made you hiss or move or talk? You—” his other hand picked out a Beanie Baby, a golden brown dog who shifted back with a muffled squeak “—how long since you were a child’s guard dog, or loved pet, confidante? How long since any of you have been _toys_?”  
  
The light overhead dimmed slightly for a moment, and it caught even Woody off-guard; he glanced up towards the bulb. Barbie had seen lights go out before, but humans had always replaced them; how long had it been since a human had entered this storage cupboard and sent the toys scurrying for cover lest they be found and bought out among the children – and the other toys – again? Then she wondered if Woody’s mad questioning was catching, and gave another little shiver.  
  
“Why do you stay here?” Woody called, recovering himself. He turned from toy to toy, trying to meet their eyes, being thwarted at each attempt. “Why do you _hide_?”  
  
“It’ss not the children we’re sscared of,” came a reply, finally. Woody turned as the green and black snake whom he had addressed earlier uncoiled itself, dropped down with a light thump to the ground, then raised its head to meet him at eye-height. “You know who it iss.”  
  
“You shouldn’t be scared of her, either,” replied Woody grimly.  
  
The snake rippled in an imitation of a shrug. “Every toy fearss and lovess their owner. Even if their owner forgetss.”  
  
“Then I’ll make her remember,” said Woody, the sheriff’s determination in his eyes. “I’ll make her pay her debts to you all."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter in particular owes a lot to the fills of [this prompt](http://disney-kink.livejournal.com/361.html?thread=518505#t518505) asking about Woody's backstory, especially Sleep by Jessieheart. If you haven’t read it, then you totally should, just ‘cos it’s awesome.

Once he would have lit up the tunnel; now it remained dark to him. Buzz paced the length of the outdoor exercise tunnel used by the children during their recess, his footsteps dull thuds upon the plastic. He was supposed to be patrolling outside, but it had started to rain, a light drizzle, and his joints stiffened sometimes if he got wet, besides the risk to his wiring. His glow-in-the-dark plastic had been fading slowly over the years in Andy’s toy box, but with the amount of time he spent in the light at Sunnyside, it was now all but made dark. Occasionally, just occasionally, it would be possible to pick out the outlines of his chestplate, his belt, his gauntlets. But they were just other bits of plastic now.  
  
He reached the end of the tunnel, pausing to survey the garden outside. Jessie didn’t necessarily want him patrolling every night, said that he did not need to, but more and more over the years he had found himself doing so anyway. Later, when she was asleep, he would return. She did not tend to come out in the rain anyway, not wanting to risk her fabric.  
  
Buzz had just turned around when a hand went across his mouth, another pinning one arm to his side. His sound of alarm muffled, he struck back with his elbow and was surprised to meet hard plastic beneath stuffing. As the arms released, his captor giving a grunt, he whirled with his hands raised, only to stop in shock at the figure before him.  
  
“Woody?”  
  
“Well, that’s a new way to greet an old friend,” said Woody, rubbing his stomach. His boots were splattered with mud and shining, but the rest of him was dry, fabric unmarred. “Nice to see you haven’t changed too much.”  
  
Buzz heard his own voice as if from a distance, hoarse. “What are you doing out here?”  
  
“You let Sid out for the day,” Woody replied, folding his arms across his chest. Buzz drew back to attention unconsciously, the two of them facing each other from their stiff positions. “It took some agreement, but he let me sew myself into his stuffing. One of the other toys unpicked it afterwards.”  
  
“I thought that he looked uneven.” Buzz frowned. At what, he could not quite decide: Woody’s escape, his presence here, or perhaps just a return to the frown that he all too often wore these days. “But I did not suspect that.”  
  
Woody waved it away. “I’ve seen plenty stranger in my time. You haven’t.”  
  
“You’d be surprised,” said Buzz, his voice softening, and finally the cowboy paused. For a moment the two looked at each other, the rain outside become heavier and starting to drum cadences around them. Then Woody stepped forward, without thinking, throwing his arms around the Space Ranger and holding them close together for a moment, some fragment of the past captured between them.

Buzz coughed awkwardly, and the moment passed. Woody stepped away again, letting his hands hang loosely at his sides, and regarded his old friend more closely. Andy had kept them both all but pristine, Buzz in particular wonderfully preserved; Bonnie had done much the same for Woody still. But Buzz’s edges had been blurred with time, rounded and worn, and he bore the scratch down his face that Woody had seen when they first met again. His other eye seemed to have become sharper as if to make up for it, maintaining the intensity of the gaze.  
  
“Two years has been a long time here, hasn’t it?” Woody said after a moment.  
  
A nod. “Has it not been for you as well?”  
  
“It...” Woody hesitated. “Not so much.”  
  
The true answer was too complicated to give. Watching Bonnie grow and her imagination change, being part of her stories and her world as they shifted, living as a toy and somehow as something more through her... was dreamlike, and infinite. So different from the years of waiting for Andy, of slowly sinking into more and more periods of darkness, of silence and despair. But at the same time he could remember what it had been like to live through Andy in that same way, though those memories were becoming more hazy now, and somewhere further back still was another life, another child, another pair of hands and another voice that gave life to Sheriff Woody Pride. The last two years had only been two of so many more that had, in the end, blurred into one great line.  
  
But he could not find thoughts for that, let alone words. And this would be far from the time to face them.  
  
“Where did you go, Woody?” asked Buzz. “You disappeared.”  
  
“I tried to go h- to Andy,” he said. “But I didn’t make it. One of the children from the Daycare took me; Bonnie, her mother works here. She... still loved toys. Still played with us. And I thought that you all wanted to be here.”  
  
“What happened about going back to Andy?”  
  
A stab of pain ran through Woody’s chest, and he shook his head slowly. “I know I told you once that the greatest thing in the world, the only thing in the world, is to be loved by a child. And somehow, I realised that Bonnie was a child still, and Andy wasn’t. Toys are needed by children, more than by adults.”  
  
Buzz paused for a moment, then nodded, the move as slow as Woody’s had been. In the hands of adults toys were made collectibles, or put on display, or let in boxes and attics. In the hands of children, they lived. All toys came to understand that. “Then what bought you back?”  
  
“Hamm.”  
  
Woody was not expecting Buzz to flinch, but flinch he did, shame and pain crossing his features as if he was about to cry himself. Buzz reached up and ran one hand across his head, a mimicry of some human movement, then leant back against the wall of the tunnel. He slid down its curved side until he was almost sitting, and Woody slumped down opposite, facing him.

“I tried to help,” said Buzz, his voice thick. “I wanted to help him. But he refused to be helped by us, after everything that had happened. He wouldn’t let us clean him off or replace his cork, hated everything that had happened. When I saw one of the adults taking him home...” he looked up, letting his hands fall to his knees, desperate hope in his eyes. “He went to the house that you were in?”  
  
“Yes,” Woody replied.  
  
“Will she take care of him?”  
  
This time he hesitated, then finally answered: “Yes.”  
  
“You can’t deceive me that easily, Woody,” Buzz said, and for a moment Woody caught a glimpse of the old Buzz Lightyear there once again. “What else is there that you have not said?”  
  
“Hamm... sleeps. He would not answer me, once he told me I had to come back here. I think he’s gone, Buzz.”  
  
“Gone?”  
  
Thirteen years. Sid and yard sales and accidents. Toys were of themselves immortal, that was what he and Barbie had both said, and that was the world that Buzz knew, but after the years grew weary and dusty and your children outgrew you, the world became a weight. Woody closed his eyes for a moment, remembering toys that he had know long ago, like ghosts in his mind now. “I’ve seen it happen before. With old toys – before your time, before the time of most of us. Me and Slink, we’re old toys, you know? I remember seeing on the television when they sent that first dog into space. So long ago. Slink joked that he’d be next.  
  
“We’re still around, kept going, kept waking up when the humans are gone. You know, how the rest of you do? You probably aren’t old enough even now to have that moment, just before you move, when you think that you could just stay there forever. Just let go, and not worry about moving and speaking. Just... sleep. It sounds attractive, sometimes. And sometimes we’d see toys sleep for a while, but then they’d come back to us again, like they remembered that they were toys. But they weren’t the same. And sometimes they’d not come back, they’d just sleep, and that was it. They were lost to us.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” said Buzz, and his voice cracked.  
  
Woody shook his head. “You didn’t know, Buzz. So few young toys do.”  
  
“No,” he said. “I mean... I’m sorry for what happened here. For everything that we’ve done.”  
  
It made his hands shake, but Woody clenched one into a fist at his side, getting to his feet and crossing the tunnel to sit beside Buzz instead. He laid one hand on the cold, plastic shoulder. “Then tell me what happened,” he said. “And maybe it can be undone.”


	10. Eighteen Months Earlier

They removed the paperclip from the reset button, holding their collective breath as they stood around Buzz’s silent, spread-eagled figure. Then he twitched, there was a whirring sound, and he looked up with a frown on his face. “What is going on?”  
  
“He’s back,” said Rex, hopping from one foot to the other in relief. “Oh my goodness, he’s back.”  
  
“Buzz?” said Jessie softly.  
  
He placed the palms of his hands against the ground and pushed himself off the ground, intending to stand but only getting as far as his knees before he had to stop. Jessie stood in front of him, a straightened-out paperclip clutched tightly in her hands, her lips shaking slightly in her pale face. It was the pallour that he saw first, the _worn_ look to her, and then—  
  
“What happened?”  
  
The words left his lips brusque, but there was a constriction akin to fear around his midsection. There were gaps, fuzzy memories, the faint sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach that somehow, something had been _inside_ him. He went to stand, felt a flapping cold around his back, and whirled in horror only for it to whirl with him, and then for Jessie’s hands to be closing him, flipping his back closed again.  
  
“It don’t matter, Buzz. You’re back,” she said, resting her forehead against the crown of his head. Buzz fell still, looking around at the expectant features that surrounded him, Rex and Hamm and Bullseye and Slinky, and Barbie and Ken as well. But Jessie was the one who pressed herself against his back, her hands flat against his shoulders, then as she tilted her head again her lips came to brush against the back of his head. “You’re back.”  
  
“Where have I been?” he asked. Rex opened his mouth, but was looking over Buzz’s shoulder as he closed it again and shuffled back a couple of steps. Hamm refused to even meet the Space Ranger’s eyes, closing the paper booklet that had been open in front of him. “Jessie, please tell me. Where have I been?”  
  
There was a momentary pause. Jessie ran one hand slowly down his back, from his shoulder right down to the joints that made up his hips, then her voice hardened as she said to the others. “As you were. Tell the others what has been done here.”  
  
Nods, murmurs, worried looks; Hamm muttered something under his breath as he turned and waddled off with the others. Buzz turned again to face Jessie, this time seeing not only the pallour of her cheeks but—  
  
“Your hair!” Surprise came into his voice. “It’s been—“  
  
He reached up to touch it, check, be sure, but her hand moved up and tightened around his wrist faster than he would have expected from a cowgirl doll. “It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “Do you remember what happened to you, Buzz?”  
  
“Remember? No, I don’t,” he said, starting to feel tingles of irritation as well as trepidation in his core. “Jessie, please, tell me.”  
  
“Lotso and the others reset you,” she said, softly, so softly that he had to strain to hear her words. Her grip grew slack around his wrist, but he did not pull away. “They made you into something else, Buzz. A soldier. Like... that other Buzz, you know? From when we first met. But worse.”  
  
“Defender of the Galaxy,” Buzz whispered. He could see the pain on Jessie’s face.  
  
“They had us in cages. And you guarded us. Not you, not—“  
  
For a moment she looked away, then removed her hand from his wrist again. Buzz’s arm fell useless to his side as Jessie took a couple of steps away along the shelf that they appeared to be in, painted blue but empty and dark. She wrapped her arms around herself, tilting her head so that her hat shaded her eyes for a moment, then spoke without looking round.  
  
“Lotso used you as a slave. But now he’s gone, and you’re back, and that’s the way it should be.”  
  
“Lotso?” Flickers in his mind, half-formed memories that could have been dreams were it not for that memory in his compartment, the sensation of hands wrenching him apart, holding him, _changing_ him. Like ghosts in the darkness. “But—“

Suddenly she turned, strode across to him in no time at all – those long legs, he supposed – and cupped his face with both of her hands. Her eyes were still bright and green and glossy, though there was something there that perhaps he did not recognise. Buzz opened his mouth to speak, only to find himself suddenly incapable of doing so, and the matter was only compounded when Jessie kissed him, hard and fierce, in a way that she had never done so before.  
  
He almost stumbled, stepping backwards out of her arms and looking at her in astonishment. “Jessie?” he asked softly, realising that he did not know the rest of the question which he wished to ask.  
  
“It doesn’t matter, Buzz,” she said, and this time he heard the desperation. Like when it had become clear that Andy did not play with them anymore, and they were starting to realise that they were going to spend longer and longer in that box. When the others had started disappearing into yard sales. “It doesn’t matter how we got here, okay? It only matters that you’re back.”  
  
They had always made a strange pair, he knew. The cowgirl and the spaceman, one new to the world and one having seen perhaps too much of it. It had taken them years to really come to terms with anything, shy kisses and holding hands when they had the opportunity to be alone together. When more and more time had been in Andy’s toy box, it had become harder to do so, but they had still found time to talk, and to sit side by side when others intruded on the conversation. Occasionally they had been able to steal embraces, and he had been astonished with the soft cloth of her body, the woollen braid of her hair. She in turn had flicked his plastic and played with his wings and laughed when he shone his light like a laser. Woody had caught him trying on her hat once, and not let either of them forget it for months. It had been slow, and tentative, but toys had all the time in the world for that, and he had thought that things might get better now that they were at Sunnyside.  
  
Now that...  
  
Now...  
  
There were such blanks. It was so hazy. He remembered cheering and shaking hands and hundreds of toys spilling out from every corner of the room. He remembered strawberry. He remembered Woody going back to Andy, and all of them hoping that he would make it. But it was like grasping at reflections in water, and as soon as he looked too closely it would disappear again.  
  
“I need to know what has happened, Jessie,” he said, with as much determination as he could muster.  
  
Even as he spoke, she was standing before him again. Her fingers brushed against his armour, and as he opened his mouth to speak – exactly as he opened his mouth to speak, and he would wonder later whether that, too, had been deliberate – she kissed him again, hot, hard, her mouth possessive against his. And then her breasts were pressing against his chest, and her hair brushed his cheek, and her hands were investigating all the crevices of his armour, and she stole the argument before it made it to his lips.


	11. Eighteen Months Earlier

They lay in silence for a while, Jessie with her head on Buzz’s chest and one hand holding in place the arms that were looped stiffly round her shoulders. More than once Buzz sought words, but each time he did he reached only the darkness in his memory, and each time he dared towards it, it seemed ready to swallow him up altogether.  
  
“You need to tell me, Jessie,” he finally managed, the words stilted, electricity buzzing in his chest. His hands clenched for a moment against her back. “I need to know.”  
  
She had given one sob, just one, as she had reached her completion. He had not understood – on either count – but the feel of their bodies together, just real for a moment, something so much more than cloth or plastic and better than being real could ever be, had been too overwhelming. All that he had been able to do was hold her afterwards. But now fear was sinking into him, and even as he held her more tightly his eyes were fixed on the ceiling above them.  
  
“Lotso owned us all,” she whispered. “No, not owned... controlled. Like slaves, not even like toys. He sent us to the Caterpillar Room like he was sending us to the lions, and crowed each time one of us fell.”  
  
“I remember the toddlers,” he replied, to hide the fact that he did not recognise her voice. The words that she used sounded strange on her lips.  
  
“Yes. But it wasn’t just that. He herded us, corralled us, tried to silence us. And...”  
  
From the corner of his eye he could see her lips trembling. Buzz sat up sharply, drawing Jessie with him and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Jessie,” he said suddenly, desperately, “did he hurt you?”  
  
“No,” she breathed, and it should have been a relief but the look in her eyes all but suggested that she wished she could say yes. “The first night, you went to ask if we could move to the Caterpillar Room. He took you, _changed_ you,” the words made him feel sick, but she continued; “and then he bought us Woody’s hat.”  
  
“His hat?”  
  
“He destroyed Woody, Buzz. And he did it just because he could. And that was when I knew I had to take him down. You have to trust me, Buzz. You gotta trust me.”


	12. Chapter 12

“My hat?” Woody’s hand flew up to his head in astonishment.  
  
For the first time, a flicker of a smile came to Buzz’s face. He nodded gently, and Woody rubbed his hand over the shining crown of his head, where his paint had been refreshed under the hands of Al’s cleaner and now was as rich and warm as it had ever been. In days that he barely remembered.  
  
“But...” a strangled laugh left his lips, slightly hysterical. Woody gestured to his chest, looking Buzz desperately in the eye. “I’m not dead, Buzz. Look at me! I’m not dead! I’m here and I’m back and...” the words faded from his lips as Buzz kept looking at him in that same way, that same strange distant smile and the sadness in his gaze. “I’m not dead,” he said. And this time it felt like a promise.  
  
“You never needed to reassure me of that,” Buzz replied, voice soft.  
  
He reached out one hand, jointed plastic, still strong and intact. He could survive more than so many of the other toys. Woody hesitated for a moment, waiting for understanding, perhaps, but then there was a rush of warmth through him and as the rain pounded down on them more heavily than ever he clasped Buzz’s hand again. A smile spread out across his features, but the space ranger did not echo the movement, and it did not take long for Woody’s smile to falter again. His hand slipped from Buzz’s as he shifted round, one knee bent, voice level though it wanted oh so desperately to tremble.  
  
“What happened, Buzz?” he asked. “What are you apologising for?”  
  
“Many things... have happened in these last months,” replied Buzz. His voice sounded rough. “Even in the time that I remember.”  
  
“You said that Lotso was gone.”  
  
“Yes,” he said quickly. “Yes... but not all of them were. There were still some who were loyal to him; more feared that he would be back, even after Jessie said...” A shiver ran through him. “Said that he would not be.”  
  
“Barbie told me what happened to some of his followers.”  
  
Until then, at least until then, Buzz had met his gaze. But now the ranger turned aside his blue eye – and it was still so disconcerting for there to only be one to be met – and spoke as if addressing someone whom Woody could not see.  
  
“There were two left. After what had happened. A purple octopus of rubbery material, named Stretch, and... Big Baby.”  
  
“What happened to them, Buzz?” said Woody softly. Coaxing, trying to keep the pleading from his voice. The way that he had once had other toys turn to him and ask what now would happen with Andy.  
  
“We sent Big Baby away,” Buzz replied. “Even... even Jessie didn’t have the heart to do anything. So we cleaned him up and snuck him out to the sidewalk, and we didn’t see him again after that. We don’t know who took him. I hope it was one of the children.”  
  
“That... isn’t so bad,” he said. Yard sales were a constant fear, a constant terror, but there were fates worse than being handed to an unknown figure. There was the dumpster, and the dust cart, and the incinerator.  
  
“I hope so,” said Buzz.  
  
Woody touched Buzz’s arm gently, just at the point of his elbow, the grey sphere that formed the joint. Buzz flinched from the touch. “And what about Stretch, Buzz? What about the other one?”  
  
“You’ve already seen her,” he said. “She’s the one who controls your door now.”


	13. Eighteen Months Earlier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains explicit scenes of torture.

“Which only leaves... you.”  
  
Jessie turned to face Stretch once again. She had her hands looped loosely behind her back, posture so upright that it looked strange on her, expression cool and calculating. The octopus had gone silent, sullen, with her legs all tied tightly together so that she could not move and her body tethered to the wall of the box. Buzz stood to the side, uncertain of where to turn, where to look; Jessie had asked that he be here, and he would never refuse her that, but he found himself thoroughly disconcerted.  
  
“Which means that you are the one to tell me about Lotso and his little friends.”  
  
To Buzz’s surprise, and chill, Stretch laughed; a brittle, chill whoop. She pulsed in her bonds like some imitation of a heart, then levelled narrow eyes on the cowgirl.  
  
“You think you know what you’re doing,” she hissed. “With your little friends and your little ideas. You think you can control this place.”  
  
Jessie stood for a moment, her face shadowed by her hat from the light overhead, then she strode over to Stretch and planted the heel of one boot against a tethered leg. At first Buzz could not see the reason for the grunt, the slight draw away, but as he looked closer he saw jagged pieces of metal that had been attached to Jessie’s boots; imitation spurs.  
  
Now the metal sank into the purple jelly flesh, cutting it cleanly open. Stretch groaned slightly, her eyes closing, then fell stubbornly silent once again.  
  
“You think,” replied Jessie, “wrongly.”  
  
She stepped back, and the spurs clicked against the floor, and this time it seemed that Buzz heard them more clearly. His hands curled into fists behind him. He wanted to stop things, wanted to be the arbiter of _justice_ , intergalactic law enforcement. But he was just a toy, and Jessie understood what was happening here, and she had told him to act as if he was still following orders rather than acting of his own free will once again.  
  
Jessie started to pace back and forth in front of Stretch, metal clipping against the wooden floor of the shelf. Their little hide-away, out of the sight of the others. To keep things quiet, she had said, but he suspected now that it was to make sure they really were hidden.  
  
“How many more were there?” Jessie asked. “Name them. All of them.”  
  
“Lotso, Big Baby, Ken, me,” Stretch replied. Then she fell silent again, eyes drooping part-shut. “That was it.”  
  
“No,” said Jessie. She walked to stand behind Stretch, out of sight. Buzz was left in the deposed hechwoman’s gaze, feeling accusation and hatred pouring from those flat black-and-white eyes. “I know there were more of you. And I want you to tell me.”  
  
“Why ask questions you already know the answer to?”  
  
Like something from a dream, Buzz watched Jessie’s distorted figure as she raised a hand and drew it in a slow, hard line down Stretch’s back. Stretch shuddered, unable to see what it was that was pressed against her.  
  
“I just want to be sure,” Jessie’s voice dropped down to a whisper, almost sensuous, leaning closer behind Stretch so that her figure was all obscured and stained purple. “That you’re telling the truth.”  
  
“You’ve had your six months of fun,” she muttered back. “You’ve already killed them all. We’re the only ones left.”

“Tell me who worked for Lotso.” Jessie curled her hand into a fist and forced it, hard, against the purple rubber. Stretch quivered. “And we’ll see how things go from there.”  
  
“We were _all_ Lotso’s,” Stretch sneered. It was hard to stand still as Jessie stepped closer still, her face unreadable and distorted. Her hand uncurled, straining, then Stretch cried out as the outermost layer of her rubber split and Jessie’s hand slipped inside. “We were- argh! We were all... oh god, please...”  
  
Her bravado evaporated as Jessie, expression gone cold, flexed and twisted her hand inside the purple gel. Glitter swirled around her hand like stars as she pulled out a handful, looked at it dispassionately, and then threw it to the ground.  
  
“By the stars, Jessie, what are you doing?”  
  
Buzz might as well have heard the words before he knew that he had spoken them. He crossed the floor in sweeping steps, Stretch returning from her pained haze to look in shock at him, and grabbed Jessie by the arm to pull her away. She whirled to glare at him, then her expression softened.  
  
She reached up to stroke his cheek, but he jerked away from the glitter clinging to her fingertips. Turning her eyes aside, Jessie withdrew her hand again. “I’m doing what needs to be done, Buzz,” she replied.  
  
“No. This is not needed. This is never—”  
  
Now she dragged her hand away, angrily, snatching it from his grasp. Her hair whipped around her face; there were tiny streaks of blue paint deeply imbedded in it. The slightest curl of a sneer came to her lips, then disappeared just as quickly, and had he not been looking closely he would not have realised that it was there at all. “You didn’t see it, Buzz,” she said, and this time her words were not cold. They were soft and trembling, like the way that he had heard her talk about Emily, long ago. “They controlled this place. They controlled you. They _took you_ , Buzz, and they used you against us.”  
  
“Jessie—“  
  
“They kept us here like cattle, not even for our own good! That’s what I want, Buzz! I want to do this for the toys here!”  
  
This time he barely parted his lips.  
  
“I will save us, Buzz. Whatever I have to do for that.” Her brows came together, her expression darkening. He’d seen that look before, on another Roundup toy, on the other side of a dream. Then her voice softened, and she shook her head. “You’re young, Buzz. You’ve lived a kind life. Go. You should not see this.”  
  
At her side, her fist clenched again, purple still smeared across her fingers.  
  
For a moment he almost turned away, then Buzz drew himself upright and looked her straight in the eye. “I’m not leaving you, Jessie.”  
  
“Then don’t stop me in what I have to do.”


	14. Eighteen Months Earlier

He did as she asked. He closed his eyes as she forced her hand into Stretch’s back, as she tied down one tentacle fully outstretched, as the blade of the knife she had taken from somewhere cut down through the purple flesh of the octopus toy. He listened to the sobs and screams. And then even when Jessie bought out the lighter, orange flame bright and high and reflected in her painted eyes, he forced himself not to drag her away from it as the tentacle was melted down into a puddle, burnt away, until Stretch had no more control over it.  
  
He closed the door behind them as they left, and when Jessie sat and picked glitter off her fingertips with her lips trembling he sat beside her, silently, and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. She shook in his arms as he removed her hat and kissed her on the lips, not knowing what he could have said, and she kissed him back with a desperation. That night he came to understand more that she found escape in the moments when he kissed her, held her, ran his fingers through her hair or round the ring of her pullstring, dragged his teeth over her fabric and ran his fingers over her seams. His own pleasure, though, seemed strangely dulled, and he was left still yearning for her though she lay cradled in his arms as they lay in a mockery of sleep until the sun rose.  
  
The other toys would not meet his eyes. He had noticed it before, in a distant way, over the previous days – but now it took on a new twinge that felt like his batteries were running low in his chest. Rex, once willing to talk, now shuffled from foot to foot and stuttered excuses before fleeing to some sanctuary. Potato Head sneered and shuffled off, and perhaps that was not so unusual, but Hamm seemed to be less talkative than usual and would spend a lot of time staring out of the windows of the room. They had all been moved to the Butterfly Room, he had discovered, as soon as Jessie had taken control.  
  
(“Three and up!” He had heard being declared, somewhere across the room. “Finally, three and up!”)  
  
He had tried to establish communication with some of the other toys, by waving or greeting them, but most of them turned frightened eyes on him and hurried away. Jessie shrugged and said that there were still “Leftover fears” from the time that Lotso had been in control, and would not say anything further.  
  
It was another week or so before she finally showed him where Woody’s hat was being kept. She had done her best to keep it protected, she said, sealing it in a box with polystyrene balls and hiding it out of reach – she hoped – from the little fingers of the toddlers. Buzz suggested that perhaps they should move it somewhere safer still, even into the vents, and she agreed with enthusiasm in her voice but no emotion at all in her eyes. He wondered whether, when she held it to her chest, rolling desert and bright blue sky unfolded in her mind. Perhaps that was why she smiled more when she had the hat in her arms.  
  
Andy’s name had long since worn from his foot, he discovered, and though he contemplated drawing it on again Jessie told him, bluntly, not to bother. Hers had been washed off, she said, by one of the daycare workers whilst they were trying to get paint out of her hair. Of course, that was before it had been cut short by one of the children who realised that safety scissors did not only work on paper, to her horror when she came back to herself again. Her tone did not invite him to ask further questions, and he merely nodded mutely, and bowed his head, and looked at the faded remnants of ownership written on his body once she was gone again.

Once or twice, some of the toys tried to leave. Secretly, without asking; Jessie caught up with them each time and sat down with them, pleading in her eyes, promising that she was going to make life better for them all. Surely they didn’t want to be lost toys, she said, and hinted at what she had seen, and every time Buzz would shake his head and wonder at how she talked them round. The new ones she greeted with sweetness and explained to them, away from the others, what had happened. They came to fear and to adore her, Buzz could see, and he wondered in how many others he had missed the same transformation.  
  
Later, he would long sometimes for those early days. When Jessie still cried for what she did and he tried to soothe her as she did so. Cruel though it could sound, in those days her sobs had seemed to ground her, and she had whispered to herself in the night promises of what she would do to make them safe.  
  
Those days before the lockdown, before her anger, before what had happened to them all. When the fear was slowly fading and the games the children created were beautiful, and just occasionally there were still bright peals of laughter and hope from the toys. When they were just awakening to dream, to hope, again.  
  
Those days when Jessie whispered that she was thankful that his glow lit up the dark around them, and curled against him as if to keep out the cold. Imperfect, but still with that glimmer of light.  
  
Those days...


	15. Chapter 15

“I’m sorry, Buzz.”  
  
It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough, and Woody knew it, but it was all the words that he could say. Hesitantly he placed his arm on the space ranger’s shoulder, then when Buzz did not move he shifted and wrapped his arms around the toy instead. There was a pause, and then he felt thick plastic arms around him in return, and they clutched at each other for a moment before shifting apart, without a word and almost guiltily, and not quite daring to meet each others’ eyes.  
  
Buzz shook his head. “There was nothing you could do. You were not here.”  
  
“But this is exactly where I should have been, Buzz! With you guys, when you needed me, and—”  
  
“You didn’t know, Woody. And we said things that we shouldn’t have done. We all did.”  
  
He remembered Buzz, young and brash and commanding. Of course, he would be a space toy. But even when the years had softened him a little, even when feeling Andy slipped through their fingers had changed them all, Buzz had still seemed that much younger and fresher and newer. It took a long, long time for toys to really grow old.  
  
Or so Woody had thought. He had rarely felt old until the Round-Up story was bought back to him; he had seen aged sadness in Jessie’s eyes in those first days, but it had never lasted for long. Slink went on, staunch and unworried by anything. Being around children, perhaps, was the thing that kept you young.  
  
And Buzz had lived two years in a world of children, but Woody was almost ready to believe that it was more.  
  
Suddenly, once again, Buzz shook his head and rose to his feet. “You should go, Woody,” he said. “I can arrange for an opportunity to be made for you. It may even be possible to take some of the others with you, for that matter.  
  
“No, Buzz.” The soft firmness in Woody’s voice made Buzz look round, quirking one eyebrow slightly in a way that was reminiscent of their old days once more. “I’m staying. I’m going to sort out this mess.”  
  
“Sometimes it seems like this whole place is bad, Woody. Rotten to the core, and we can’t fix it. Jessie got rid of Lotso, saved us all, and now...”  
  
His shoulders sagged slightly, and he had to turn his head away. Even Woody knew that neither of them would be able to say the words aloud, would be able to say anything against their friend. Even in the darkness of this place with its locks and cases and fear.  
  
“She’s our owner,” finished Buzz softly.  
  
“She’s still Jessie, Buzz,” said Woody. “I can fix this. _We_ can fix this, you hear me?” He put one hand beneath Buzz’s chin, forcing them to look each other in the eye once again. A damaged spaceman and an old cowboy without a hat. “Because Buzz, I think I’m going to need your help.”  
  
“Say the word, Woody.”  
  
In his mind it should have been said with a smile. He would have settled for that old fiery-eyed look of determination. But Buzz’s expression did not change, and there was the slightest hint of desperation in his eyes that Woody did his best not to see.  
  
“Get me inside that Butterfly Room, old friend,” he said. “And get me into the vents. I’ll need them to move around in during the day.”  
  
“Okay,” said Buzz, but it was slow and Woody gave him a worried look. “They’ve been blocked from the vent that is easiest for us to access, but I can show you how to get past the blockade. You should be safe in there.”  
  
“Thanks, Buzz. Let’s do this.”


	16. Chapter 16

The lights had been turned off in the Butterfly Room, and most of the toys were settled now to sleep. No-one saw – or at least, so Woody hoped – as he and Buzz shimmied up the piece of string that dangled through the window, coiled it up to draw it inside after them, and made their way down to floor level once again.  
  
“The vent is behind that cupboard,” said Buzz, in a lowered tone. Well, at least he’d learnt that, it seemed. “Go around the walls. I’ll meet you there.”  
  
Buzz, with his plastic body, would get jammed in spaces that Woody would be able to slip or squeeze through. But equally, Woody could not risk crossing the open floor. As nimbly as the day he had been sewn, Woody slithered behind the long, low row of shelves that took him to the corner, pulling faces as the dust stuck to his boots or caught in the cuffs of his sleeves. From the corner it was more open, and he glanced back and forth checking for movement – other than the silhouette of Buzz, still walking calmly across the open floor – before sprinting, all but careering, across the open space until he could slip, panting, behind the other cupboard.  
  
He could see the vent clearly enough from here, the screws loosened to allow access without alerting humans to their plans. Woody was already working on unscrewing them when Buzz appeared, making his hands flap and causing the screw in them to fall to the ground, thankfully muffled by carpet.  
  
“Geez, Buzz,” he hissed. “You scared me. Don’t go–”  
  
Buzz held up a hand sharply, for silence. Woody was about to open his mouth and hiss that they were well-hidden back here, and frankly no-one would recognise his voice, when words caught at his ears and seemed to turn him to stone where he stood.  
  
_“I’m sorry, Woody.”_  
  
Light gleamed on the junction of the vent at the far end, bouncing round to filter in the faintest of lines through the grill. He had not noticed it before. Woody’s hand fell still, on the foot of the grill and just about to open it, his mouth falling open slightly.  
  
_“I wish you were here to help with all of this.”_  
  
“Jessie,” he whispered, and started to pull open the grate. Buzz’s hand slammed down on his, stopping the move instantly, and when he turned with a frown the space ranger shook his head. “Oh, come--“  
  
Buzz shook his head more fiercely.  
  
_”You’ve always been a leader,”_ continued the voice, softly, tinged with sadness. But he could still hear Jessie’s lyrical tones beneath it all, perhaps bought out again by the ring of metal that surrounded her. _”You never went and did things wrong.”_  
  
If only she knew. Woody shook his head, stepping back from the grill, only to look round in surprise as Buzz lifted up the grate – it squeaked ever-so-slightly – and climbed through, motioning for Woody to back off to the far side, into the shadows of the cupboard. He did so, flattening himself against the wall, feeling exposed even though he knew it was in darkness. Out of the line of the grill he could hear nothing more than rumblings of talk, momentary silence, then footsteps leading out. The ring of metal on metal rang in his cowboy soul, but he gritted his teeth not to say a word as Jessie slipped down from the grill, closed it behind her, and walked out from behind the cupboard.  
  
For one wild instant he wanted to follow her. Then an arm shot out of the grill and grabbed him by the shoulder, sending him jumping a foot in the air and flailing. It was only then that he realised Buzz was attached to the other end of it, and allowed himself to be pulled up into the vent as well.  
  
“Come on,” whispered Buzz, “I need to be back soon.”  
  
Woody found himself steered left at the end of the corridor, and was about to say that he knew what to do about vents when they entered a blocked-off, wider area that might just have been a room. He stopped dead, Buzz’s arm slipping away from his, to look around with wide, horrified eyes.

His first impression was of _pieces_. Pieces of toys: an arm, a leg, a wing. Like a graveyard, only without the sense of peace. Only then did he realise what was in the centre of the room, pointing straight towards him, gleaming and just as he recalled it.  
  
“My hat!”  
  
The exclamation left his lips as he strode towards it, reaching to grab it only to find, once again, that Buzz caught him by the wrist and pulled him away. He rounded on the space ranger with fury in his eyes.  
  
“Now, don’t you dare—”  
  
“If she finds that hat gone, all hell will break loose,” said Buzz flatly. “Don’t risk it, Woody.”  
  
The words died, though his anger did not. Woody scowled as Buzz walked over to the back wall, gently sliding his fingers behind the tape to reveal a section of the cardboard that opened like a door.  
  
“Through here,” he said, “and if you hear footsteps in this room, for goodness’ sake keep quiet. You can access pretty much all of the rest of the vents from here.”  
  
Finally he softened slightly, allowed himself to nod, and patted Buzz on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he said, sincerely. “Can I meet you again, here, at nightfall?”  
  
Buzz frowned. “I’ll try. It isn’t easy to access this vent. But I’ll do what I can.”  
  
He didn’t ask. He didn’t even ask, and though Woody could remember clearly all of their fights and disagreements he knew that if he survived a thousand years he would remember Buzz like this, now. They clasped hands, one last time, then Woody slipped through the cardboard and drew it closed behind him, so tightly that barely a chink of light came through.  
  
Moments later, the light on the other side went out altogether. Then he heard Buzz’s footsteps, leaving, and the sound of the vent. It sounded like the closing doors of the arena, but in his mind Woody could see his next steps unfolding, and in the darkness he smiled grimly, and waited.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, influenced by the works that I cited previously, in terms of Woody's backstory. Slinky Dogs were also sold in the 50s-60s, so I figured that Slink is pretty old too. It's actually surprising how old some of the toys are...

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, humans said. Even then, they were wrong, but Woody found it more pertinent that such a phrase had never been applied to toys. More than that, toys had no such saying.  
  
It was close to breaking the rules. You weren’t supposed to do things that might harm humans, or that might make it possible for you to be caught. And stealing a cell phone probably counted as both, or certainly would once Woody had finished with it. Wondering in mutters how Slink had managed it, he made his way through the ducts, tip-toeing along the metal so as not to make too much noise.  
  
It had been Trixie who had first introduced him to Youtube. Of course, knowing about it explained a lot, when it had come to the previous few years, but none of the toys had really seen Andy on his computer for some time before he left for college. Trixie enjoyed explaining about the computer, Woody discovered, and it had proven a useful tool.  
  
Which was about to become even more useful.  
  
A cleaning cloth from under the cupboard, done up with a few safety pins, made it easier for him to scoop up the touch-screen cell phone and bring it back round to behind the cardboard screen. A peek out to check that no-one was watching, a few minutes poking at the screen to be sure that he could work it quickly enough, then he found the video that he was looking for and downloaded it, quickly, into the phone’s memory.  
  
Dinosaurs and computers. Who would’ve thought.  
  
He was setting it up behind the cardboard when a thought struck him. Woody peered through the slit in the card again, weighing up his options, then left the mobile behind and slipped out through the room again. It was still tempted to retrieve his hat. But Buzz knew this place, and there had been fear in his voice, so Woody left his hat, his damn crown, where it was, and made his way past the junction to the playroom, that heart-tugging sound of children talking, singing, laughing, and across the other side.  
  
There was no light in this half; he presumed it was a dead end, blocked off by some building renovation or other some years ago. But it should do. Woody was about ready to take a gamble on the fact that no-one came down to this end when he rounded the corner, and was stopped dead in his tracks.  
  
Dust on the ground. Shadows making it almost black. And there, curled up in the end of the corridor, Slink. His eyes were closed, head resting on his front paws, his spring now with a couple of sharp kinks in the metal before reaching his back paws, tucked into his body. His tail bowed to gravity. Woody clutched at the metal wall of the duct for support, feeling his knees go weak beneath him, until he found his noise enough to whisper: “Slink?”  
  
There was no answer. Woody thought back to all of the time they had spent in the attic together, chasing spiders or talking about the future and the past. He stepped forwards, slowly, as if he was trying not to wake some sleeping beast besides them both, feeling an ache in the centre of his chest.  
  
“Hey there, Slink,” Woody said again, softly, dropping to one knee beside the plastic dog and running his hand over one floppy ear. His throat tightened as there was no response. “Slink, you hear me?”

Still nothing. Woody’s hand began to shake as he stroked Slink’s ear again, then he bent his head to press their foreheads together. Once they had been young and foolhardy together, wrapped up in the worlds that Andy’s father had created, and then in the attic they had been patient and hopefully and, at least at first, probably slightly annoying to the older and more sensible toys who had wanted them to settle down and rest, and pass the years without swinging from the rafters and riding around the attic like a pair of lunatics. And then of course they had mellowed together, until suddenly that magical day came when Andy’s father came back into the attic again, dusted off his old toys, and chose from among them the ones that Andy would receive.  
  
Slink had taken to resting more and more, in those later days. He didn’t remember things so clearly again when he woke up, their inside jokes and shared games. But he was still Slink, even as he became Andy’s toy, and after Andy’s father’s death they had sat up all night and wished that they were human to say a proper goodbye, and Andy had slept peacefully whilst they crept back and curled as close to him as they dared without giving themselves away.  
  
Woody held the memories like pieces of old films, throwing his arms around Slink’s head and keeping back the urge to weep by will alone. He wondered how long it had taken, when it had been, and over and over again he whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”  
  
How much time he spent there, he did not know. Eventually he released Slink’s head, stroked his closed eyes, but he could not leave without turning his attention to the kinks in that old metal spring. A bit of grunting, the application of his boot, and he straightened them out as best he could, leaving the spring in shining metal circles once again.  
  
“At least you’re here, Slink,” he said finally. “No trash can for you.”  
  
He could feel the anger, somewhere deep within him like a ball of string all tangled up in itself and trying to writhe free. It had not done so yet, and perhaps that was good, because as Woody went back to get the cell phone again and position it just out of sight around the corner of the dead-end vent, he watched his hands and was vaguely surprised to see that they did not shake. Like the oil in a lava lamp, slowly heating up, threatening to break free and rise in discrete bubbles to the surface, he could feel the fury within himself, the brashness he had never lost. As old as a toy became, part of them stayed young forever.  
  
He dragged the mobile into place and turned up the volume as far as it would go, then turned to go back to the main room, that sick museum, that had been put together. He was barely round the corner when he heard the vent opening; his eyes flew wide and he held his breath, flattening himself instinctively against the wall. Then it closed, and the solid clunks that followed where Buzz’s steps if ever he heard them. Woody was already releasing his breath when his name sealed the deal.  
  
“Woody? Are you here?”  
  
“I’m here, Buzz,” he replied, stepping away from the wall and into the middle of the corridor. He centred himself, Horatio-like, folding his arms; the space ranger almost bumped into him with the suddenness of the movement.  
  
“I thought that you were going to be moving around the vents today,” Buzz said.  
  
“I was.” The words came out flat, more so than even he had thought, and it might have been his imagination but it seemed that Buzz shrank slightly from him. “I’ve been done that other side, Buzz.”  
  
There, a definite flinch. Buzz’s gaze turned downwards, just slightly, falling on the duster at Woody’s neck.  
  
“You knew already what happens when a toy sleeps.”  
  
“Yes,” Buzz replied, and the word was a broken whisper.  
  
“You knew before I told you about Hamm.”

This time it was only a nod, like the power was draining out of him. When had he stopped glowing in the dark?  
  
Relenting slightly, Woody unfolded his arms, letting them fall to his sides. “What happened, Buzz? How’d... he end up there?”  
  
“He just went there one day,” Buzz whispered, voice cracking across the words. “He’d spend more and more time away from us, and then one day he just disappeared off, of his own accord. By the time we found him...”  
  
“When was it, Buzz?” Again and again, the name on his lips. Like he was reminding himself who he was speaking to, like he was clinging to what they had once been.  
  
“Almost a year ago.” Buzz’s eyes squeezed shut, his hands slowly clenching into fists. “He and I... we were the ones who always talked about you coming back. Always us. He was the one who believed me, all the way through.”  
  
Woody swallowed. “What about the others?”  
  
A bitter laugh broke from Buzz’s lips. “This isn’t Andy’s room, Woody. It isn’t even a child’s room. There’s only one person in chaps and a cowboy hat around here.”  
  
“Not for much longer,” he said, deadpan. “Will Jessie come here tonight?”  
  
“She does almost every night,” replied Buzz. “Sometimes with me, sometimes without. She likes to talk to you.”  
  
A slow pause, a world-wearied nod. “Well, this time I’ll talk back. Go on, Buzz, see if you can bring her here. I’ll be waiting.”  
  
“No-one orders her around, you know. And aren’t you going to tell me what you plan?”  
  
“Not this time,” Woody said, and a cold grin curled at the corner of his mouth. “This time I’ve got no posse, and that means riding solo. But I’ll be coming, Buzz. Whatever happens, I’ll be coming.”


	18. Chapter 18

She wasn’t supposed to leave. Barbie had wished that there was another way out than the door, that there could have been a way to slip out unnoticed, but even with the whispered orders through the keyhole for Stretch to open the door because she had a message to carry, it was difficult. Ken tried to stop her (“Babe, what are you doing? Babe—”) until she was forced to push him away and almost flee out into the Caterpillar Room, the door closing behind her. She was the only one that was allowed out, after all.  
  
It felt cold. Toys weren’t supposed to, not really, but Barbie shivered and rubbed her arms as she looked around the quiet room. Glow worm was over by the shelves, keeping everyone in that place where they felt safe and protected and thanked Jessie for giving them the promise that they could be together forever. She looked longingly at him for a moment, then turned and made her way over to the door, cupping her hands around her mouth and calling up to the crane at the top, _sotto voce_ and wishing that she could have been quieter still.  
  
“It’s me, Barbie! Let me up!”  
  
The little plastic doll at the top glanced down to verify her claim, then the line of string wriggled down towards her. Barbie slipped her foot into the loop at the end and allowed herself to be raised up to the top of the doorframe, shuffled across, and lowered down the other side again.  
  
A jointed plastic gorilla shuffled towards her warningly, and Barbie flinched for a moment before remembering herself, gathering her thoughts together. “It’s only me. I need to speak to Jessie.”  
  
The gorilla grunted. None of them knew whether or not it could speak; perhaps it simply chose not to. But if it did not talk, it did not argue, and it was utterly devoted to Jessie and her cause, so far as any of them could work out. Its dull plastic eyes regarded her flatly for a moment, then with another grunt and a toss of its head it lead her towards the security office. Barbie frowned and was about to turn away when its hand closed around her wrist and it gave a rather more insistent tug. Holding her tongue, she allowed herself to be dragged in to the quiet room, the fuzzy black-and-white screens casting a flickering pall over them.  
  
The chair spun round, Jessie standing on it and leaning on the back. She looked down at Barbie coldly. “I saw you leave the Lockdown,” she offered.  
  
“I need to talk to you,” Barbie replied, her voice cracking slightly. Jessie walked to the front of the chair and dropped down in one fluid movement, bending at the knees before swooping upright. She stood a couple of inches taller than Mattel’s famous girl, though Barbie was usually used to being quite the average size around other toys. “It’s about Woody.”  
  
Jessie’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What of him?”  
  
“He left—”  
  
One hand was raised, the back facing towards her, as anger flashed in Jessie’s eyes. Barbie flinched again. “He is _dead_ , Barbie. _We know that he is dead._. The toy you saw is not Woody. Do you understand me?”  
  
“But—“  
  
“ _The toy that you saw_ ,” said Jessie again, enunciating every word with a painful clarity that seemed harsher as her accent slipped away. She paused, swallowed, and slowly lowered her hand back to her side again. When she spoke, she might have passed for calm once again. “Was not the Woody we once knew. Perhaps he is an imposter. Perhaps he even looks the same. But he is not our Woody.”  
  
“He talks like Woody,” whispered Barbie, desperation forcing the words out despite the fear that made her shake.  
  
“Woody would not have left us here,” came the reply, and Barbie could think of nothing to say for it. “He would have known, he would have come back for us. He wouldn’t have let this happen.”

Barbie opened her mouth, then closed it again, bowing her head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But whoever he is, he’s gone.”  
  
“I’ll have Buzz do a sweep,” said Jessie, coolly, as if her anger had not burst out just seconds before. “He can’t have gone far. Frankly, he’s one toy that I’d allow to leave.”  
  
She nodded hastily, and turned as if to go.  
  
“And Barbie?”  
  
Pausing, frightened. She bit her lip, and tried but failed to turn around.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
And the world breathed again.


	19. Chapter 19

He’d heard them talking, outside the grate, their voices carrying in.  
  
_”I’m sure that the others will be perfectly capable of performing a sweep of the perimeter, Jessie. I would rather stay with you.”_  
  
“No, Buzz. I need you out there, checking for me.”  
  
“But if you need protecting—“  
  
“I can protect myself, Buzz.” The words sharper, harsher. “But I only trust you to do this properly for me.”  
  
There had been a pained silence after that, and Woody had pressed his back against the cool metal of the vent, then Buzz had murmured something inaudible, indescribable, and the grate had creaked open. He heard it close again, then a soft sigh; Jessie’s voice, and at least he recognised that about her.  
  
Her footsteps rang on the metal of the vent, and he peered round the corner to see her silhouetted in the light, metal glinting at her boots. He glanced down at the plastic spurs that adorned his own boots, then shuddered as she clinked with each step as she turned, away from him, down that left-hand turn to that mockery of a museum that had been constructed. Museums were human things, any toy would say that, but Woody remembered how once he had thought that going to one would be a blessing. A place to rest and quietly – without fights, without tears, without drops and paint splatters – give their love to children.  
  
Buzz had shown him that he was wrong then. And Buzz, it was clear, was so much to Jessie. He wondered where they had gone wrong this time.  
  
A light flicked on at the end of the corridor, and Woody flinched for a moment before peering round to see Jessie’s shadow, her back to him, her hat now removed from her head and one hand brushing through her hacked-short hair. It looked mussed at the ends, as if the wool was starting to unravel. For a moment Jessie stood tall, her shadow made huge by the light she stood before, then the hat fell from her fingers, her shoulders slumped, and before he knew it she had dropped to her knees.  
  
He took a step forward, then caught himself as she looked up, towards the hat. Woody could not see her expression; from her pose he would have guessed upset, desperation, tiredness.  
  
What he did not expect was the anger that rang in her tones.  
  
“Why can’t you decide, _Woody_?” Jessie said, her voice low but clear and as accusing as it had been when she thought he was going to abandon them to Al so many years ago. “You didn’t come back, so just let us be. It doesn’t help reminding us, you know.”  
  
She paused, sighed again, then spoke on in a more subdued tone. Woody felt a lump in his throat, and reached as if to doff his hat before realising that it was not there.  
  
“We were toys without kids, Woody. A town without a sheriff. You weren’t here.”  
  
Another pause, this one punctuated by the snap of metal on metal. Tapping her foot on the ground with those makeshift spurs?  
  
“You still aren’t with us. I just... sometimes wish that you were.”  
  
Her voice trailed off into sorrowful silence. Woody stood in the vent a moment longer, willing himself not to shake, then he turned to the phone beside him. A touch to the screen bathed him in light, and he looked up worriedly, but Jessie did not turn round. A few buttons, turning up the volume as high as it would go, and then the old tune rattled through the ducts.  
  
A scratchy fiddle. An old accordion. Music that rang in their souls more than their memories.  
  
_”Woody’s Round-up, right here every day._  
Woody’s Round-up; come on, it’s time to play.”  
  
Jessie turned, rising to one knee, as Woody pressed the phone face-down against the floor of the vent to muffle the light. He could still only see her outline, dark against the background, as she rose slowly to her feet with her hat still cradled in one hand.  
  
_”There’s Jessie the yodellin’ cowgirl_  
(Yodel-eyhe-yodel-eyhe-yodel--)”  
  
“Woody?” she asked, across the words meant for her. Her voice was suddenly tremulous and young, and Woody slammed his hand onto the off-button of the phone.  
  
_”Bullseye, he’s—“_

The vent fell ringingly silent. Jessie’s hat twitched in her hand. In the shadows, Woody slowly got to his feet once again, straightening up with eyes set and mouth a strict line.  
  
“You know you ain’t doing right, Jessie,” he said.  
  
It came out more forceful than he had thought it would, harsher. Like a judgement passing his lips. He stayed still as she took a couple of steps forward, slowly, like she was crossing an unsteady bridge.  
  
“This is no way to be treating toys.”  
  
He wished for his hat. But it wasn’t there, and all that he could do was square his shoulders and let his hands fall by his sides as he stepped out into the edge of the light. It travelled up him: boots, jeans, vest, face. Jessie started to tremble as he stepped out into the light, his face grim, and held her hat in front of her with both hands clasped around the brim. Her face was shadowed at first, then slowly he walked up to her, and then around her, leaving her to circle on the spot and slowly turn towards the light. It flowed across her face, a cold yellow on her pale skin, not reflected in her eyes. As if she, too, slept.  
  
“You know better than this.”  
  
Finally, more than her eyes he looked into her face, and a cold shock ran down him. With her eyes gone cold, he had thought that it would be in her expression that showed that what he said had found some home in her mind. But that too was still, unyielding, a tiny curl of her lip more a sneer than a smile.  
  
“Take him, Snake,” she said, and Woody did not have the time to understand the words before he felt plastic segments wrapped around him, pinning his arms to his side. He opened his mouth to cry out and received another coil across his face for his pains, so broad as to half-cover his eyes. He could not see Jessie as she spoke on. “You think I didn’t learn from you? That I don’t remember all the things you used to do? Turn him to me.”  
  
His feet had already been pulled from the ground, and he had been too shocked to realise until then. It was apparent already, from the strength of the hold, that kicking was useless; Woody allowed himself to be tilted forwards until he was looking down into Jessie’s eyes, as if suspended from some hook on a wall or thrown onto some shelf. She met his gaze without a hint of fear, or remorse.  
  
“I was warned you were planning something, and I guessed you’d be here. Buzz will be dealt with for his betrayal separately. You need rather more immediate attention.”  
  
“Jessie—” he tried to say, but her name was pressed back into his lips.  
  
“You used to lead toys, Woody. But that’s all. Nothing more than the Sheriff you were made, nothing more than what humans made you. I doubt you could survive without them.  
  
“Do you know what humans think of toys? I heard about Sid; I know what you saw. You know Sid, and you know Andy, and even Andy sent us away, and he’s one of the _good guys_ , Woody. We’re marketable. We’re consumable. And then we’re disposable.”  
  
The words sounded so strange on her lips that Woody writhed half in a futile attempt to loose himself and half in bemused humiliation. They weren’t children’s words, and toys lived in children’s worlds with a children’s language to surround themselves in.  
  
“You gotta stop being a toy to escape that, Woody. The others don’t understand, so I’ll let them be toys for now, let them worry about having an owner and playtime and a _name_. But me?”  
  
She stepped forwards, closer to him, gazing up into his face so that it seemed that her eyes filled all of his vision, surrounding him, suffocating him.  
  
“You stop being a toy, and you’re free. I’m not a toy any more, Woody. That’s why I can own them all.”


	20. Chapter 20

He was dragged unceremoniously from the vents, with a ringing hollow sound as he was hauled over the metal. The grate was being held open now, by some dress-up doll with a pout and blonde hair that was clearly meant to be a copy of Barbie herself, who turned her eyes away. Woody did not realise until he was drawn beyond the cupboard that eyes were fixed on him: rows and rows of glass or plastic or painted eyes, hundreds of toys on the floor and shelves and furniture, filling the room. Watching as he was dragged away, in the grip of the snake and behind Jessie, to be loaded unceremoniously into the back of the yellow dump truck and out of sight.  
  
He closed his burning eyes, shame biting at his throat. He had seen Barbie, hiding her head in Ken’s chest as the male doll, unable to look away, stared into the middle distance over Woody’s head. He had seen Buzz, on his knees and guarded by two Action Men toys and with some heavy-built figure, perhaps a wrestling toy, holding him down. Their gazes had met just for an instant, but Woody had not been able to bear it and had torn his eyes away again to look up to the artwork-spangled ceiling.  
  
The dump truck rumbled into life and Woody opened his eyes again watched the walls pass by as he was taken somewhere: through one door, then another, places that he did not know. Finally they stopped, the dark of the room swallowing up the world, and he saw Jessie walk past – from this angle, she looked as tall as any human – and heard her drop to the floor.  
  
“Terk,” she called, her voice clear still in the darkness. “Open it up.”  
  
A grunt, then creaking plastic and faint flickers of light appearing. He didn’t hear an instruction, but felt himself being lowered out again to the ground, plopped onto his feet mere inches from where Jessie stood. Anger building, he was about to lunge at her when another arm wrapped around his waist, punching the air from his lungs and the movement from his arms. He looked down at the arm: black, plastic, and crafted to resemble hair. A second grunt from behind him started to sound rather more apelike and he felt a shiver down his voicebox.  
  
“I’ve bested you in fights before,” said Jessie, and he thought for a moment that she sounded normal again.  
  
“Yeah,” replied Woody, “but if I’d had both my arms...”  
  
He wished for a reaction, but none came, and he turned his gaze in the same direction as she turned her steps. Sometimes he had dreamt of the others, in the last two years, or had spoken without thinking to one of them before turning to find Dolly or Buttercup giving him an unimpressed, unconvinced gaze. He wondered whether he had seen enough over the years to dream this.  
  
The room was too dark for him to see anything other than the doll’s house ahead of them; it was no Dream House, not plastic and made to fit some doll the size of Ken or Barbie or Action Man. It modelled a Georgian property – Woody had learnt many things from television programmes that Andy had watched or slept through – with the front given a delicate façade that imitated marble blocks. It had clearly been meant for toys some sixteen or eighteen inches tall, and stood high, three-storied and with symmetrical rows of windows containing tiny panes of plastic.  
  
Jessie opened the front door – it levered outwards, perfect; a miniature rather than a house? – and Woody felt himself shoved through. He stumbled, fell to his knees, then as he was rising again he turned to see that she had followed him through, closed the door behind her, and was now standing with her arms folded and an expression on her face like a scientist watching an experiment.  
  
“What are you doing, Jessie?” he snapped, getting to his feet. He started towards her again, but this time her hand raised, chest-height, and he stopped as if an invisible wall had been placed between them. “Have you lost your mind?”  
  
“No,” she replied coolly. “I have found it. Because I am no longer mindless.”  
  
Spluttering noises left his lips, but nothing coherent; the old Jessie would have whooped with laughter at his confusion, but this one merely watched him with disinterest for a moment and then cut across his gibbering.

“I am not here to fight you. Even if you could fit me, what would you do then? You do not understand this place, do not know what I have done for the toys here. But they do.”  
  
“You have...” Woody fought for words. He felt like they were there, should be there. Sometimes, when Andy had been much younger and it had been Andy’s father that gave him movement and words, there had been new thoughts that sprung into his mind. Adult thoughts, complicated thoughts, _real_ thoughts that a toy should not have worried about. He tried to reach for them again, through Bonnie and Andy and the haze of the years, but it was like grasping at shadows on the surface of the sea. “You have _enslaved_ them.”  
  
“No, they were already enslaved. I am readying to free them.” The word fell easier from her lips, and he shuddered. “Turn to your left,” Jessie added, her voice taking on a sing-song tone that sounded nothing like her, something like a child, something like a voice that lurked in his nightmares. “There is a dining room. The seats will do for our heights. Then we can talk.”  
  
He found his feet turning without the need for his brain to play a part, his body moving. It was lovely, gliding, soothing, even as a part of his mind raged against the rest. Jessie followed him into the dining room, with a beautiful eight-seater dining table that was, as she had promised, just the right height; eight chairs around it; settings with replica crockery and glassware and cutlery; a miniature painting on the wall, too blurred for him to recognise even if he knew anything about artwork. He drew out a chair for Jessie at the head of the table, let her sit down, then found himself sinking into the chair at her left hand side.  
  
“Ain’t it easy?” she said, her voice back to normal again, save for the soothing listlessness that trickled through it. “Tell a story, and we follow it. Live it. Perhaps believe it.”  
  
Woody felt as if he could not breathe, as if there was a weight on his chest. He knew that he had no airway, no lungs, that he did not have the body that humans did – yet still he felt what he was sure were analogues of their feelings.  
  
Analogues. There was a word for Andy’s father. It seemed like it had been in a different voice when it sounded in his head.  
  
He swallowed, or moved as if he did. “It’s what we’re made for, Jessie. We’re toys. When the children believe their stories enough, we believe them too. That’s how things are, how they should be.”  
  
“But I didn’t need to believe those words for you to move. I just needed to talk as if I did.”  
  
On his knees, his hands trembled, and he clasped them tightly together. “Jessie, look. Stop this. Stop these words, and what you’re doing, and—“ he had not even realised that he had started gesticulating wildly, but suddenly he was “—and come back to us, Jess. It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s not just that you shouldn’t do this – you don’t have to!”  
  
Finally, he saw something in her gaze, some flicker of sadness. Jessie folded her hands on the table, leaning forward slightly, earnestly, and he did not realise for the first moment how _human_ the gesture was. When she spoke, her voice had become slightly muted, slightly pained. “No, Woody. I don’t have to. As for should... that’s another question. But tell me... how far back do you remember?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You’re old. We’re both old. How far back to you remember? How far does it go?”  
  
Again, Woody found himself scrambling for words. Images blossomed in his head: of Bonnie, of Andy, of the attic, of... “I remember Andy’s father,” he said finally.  
  
“He must have had a name,” said Jessie.  
  
Like a shape on his tongue, he searched for it, but it was not there. Horror flickered in Woody’s eyes as it flashed across his body, and his shoulders slumped as he turned his gaze away.

“That’s normal for toys,” Jessie continued, quietly. “You know, when they get sold or move on? Most of the toys here, they hardly remember a time before this place any more. It dims over time. Oh, maybe with some of the older ones it stays a little longer. Five years, ten years. Long enough for it to hurt. But always that fuzziness creeps in, because we live through humans, not for ourselves. We only have a life with our owner.  
  
“I didn’t realise it at first. I thought it was normal, you know, to remember everything. To remember Emily.” The word was mellow and sweet on her tongue, as if she was saying the name of a spirit. “I remember the years. It was nineteen sixty-four when she took me outta my box and I woke up, when she was six. It was nineteen seventy-one when she played with me for the last time. And it was nineteen eighty when she found me again, and put me out in that charity box.”  
  
The words thrummed against him, and something dark and old and intelligent stirred in the depths of Woody’s mind. He held his tongue.  
  
“Toys aren’t supposed to know years, Woody. But I knew them. And it was eighteen years between that charity box and meeting you, and you remember that story I told you? I could tell it again today. It’s been nearly thirty years now. What were you doing thirty years ago, Woody?”  
  
Had that been the attic? Had it been the years of him and Slink? Or had it been earlier than that? He groped into the dusty darkness, and found no clear shapes there.  
  
“Most toys don’t remember. I didn’t know that. It was Lotso that told me.”  
  
After what Barbie had told him, the name sent a shiver down his spine, made him feel as if he wanted to gag. Slowly, Woody turned his gaze back to Jessie again, seeing an intensity in her expression that did not reach her eyes, a tautness in the way her hands clasped each other, a grit to her teeth.  
  
“He remembered everything as well, Woody. Right up ‘til the end, he remembered it all.  
  
“He asked me to kill him in the end. He said he wished sometimes that he would sleep, and not wake up, but towards the end he hadn’t been able to sleep at all. Not even for a moment. And he said kill, and I replied that toys didn’t die, but then he asked what I thought I’d done to the other toys of his, that I’d... removed.”  
  
“Lotso was mad,” said Woody, his voice coming out hoarse. “Lotso corralled you all up like cattle ready for the slaughter.”  
  
“Perhaps he was mad. Perhaps he had to be mad to realise that he could live without an owner, and act of his own volition, and that he didn’t have to be what some human child wanted him to be. Or perhaps that made him mad.”  
  
He had expected denial, and it was snatched away from before him.  
  
“We talked for a while before I killed him, you know. And I don’t know whether it was what I did, or whether he just believed that he was dying. And that night, it was like waking up for a second time. It sounds like you don’t remember how it was the first time, feeling a hand on you, your box moving, coming to life for the first time as a child takes hold as you. That sudden realisation that you are a _toy_. Everything so simple.  
  
“Waking up a second time... that was realising that I was _alive_. Alive in my own right, without needing a child to make my stories and do my voice for me. Realising that I don’t need to gasp for breath if there’s something heavy on me, or my head’s underwater. Realising that I don’t need to talk like a child, or think like a child. Realising that I have a _consciousness_.”  
  
And with that word, enunciated so clearly, so earnestly, the world collapsed around him.


	21. Eighteen Months Earlier

“So,” said Lotso softly. “You’ve come for me at last.”  
  
He let the chair spin, turning him away from the CCTV cameras to the cowgirl standing just inside the doorway of the room. His fur looked greyish in the monochrome light of the screens above him, his eyes gone dim.  
  
“I was wonderin’ how long it might take.”  
  
The cowgirl didn’t reply as he looked down to her. Her hair was cropped short now, above her shoulders – damn, but those Caterpillar kids could be difficult – with streaks of paint dried into it in places still, as well as on her chaps. He could see where she had tried to remove it, but obviously failed. In one hand she held a paperclip bent like a grabbling hook; the other was half-curled into a fist at her side as she levelled her hatred-filled gaze onto him.  
  
Lotso eased down out of the chair to the ground, his old damaged leg bowing slightly beneath him before he pulled down the mallet after him and lent on it with a sigh. There was no anger in him, not now; not even much fire left.  
  
“You’ve taken out the others already, ain’t you? I knew after Big Baby went that it wouldn’t be much longer.”  
  
She didn’t oblige him with a response.  
  
“Come on now, Jessie. Don’t tell me that wasn’t your plan.”  
  
Finally, a short, bitter laugh made it through her lips. “That’s the first time you’ve used my name to my face. Even when you were threatening me, you didn’t say it.”  
  
“Did you bring any of the others with you?”  
  
“No, Lotso. It’s just you and me.”  
  
He nodded, slowly, averting his eyes for a moment. He didn’t need to keep looking to see the string looped over her shoulder like a rope, the penknife that she had tied to her back. Her footsteps clicked across the floor towards him.  
  
It had never been difficult for Lotso to have access to anywhere in Sunnyside; the places that he did not go were usually such because he did not want to go there. Occasionally he had been able to see one of the staff at a computer; he had learnt by watching and by experiments how to work it.  
  
“Y’all’s got some fifty-five years, ain’t that right, Jessie? Good thing that the staff here don’t know what a collector’s item you are, or you’d’ve been on sale some time ago. Though that might have kept the young’uns away from you. Why, if I’d known myself I might have kept you in the Butterfly Room.”  
  
He turned slowly, leaning heavily on his cane, to follow her as she circled. Like a wolf picking out its prey from a herd, perhaps.  
  
“That ain’t what angered me, Lotso, and you know it.”  
  
“Of course. Your family. That Buzz Lightyear of yours said that, as well, that you stayed together as a family. Pity, really, how that all turned out.”  
  
“We’ll bring him back,” said Jessie, her voice low and growling. “Ken’s told me how you changed him, and we’ll bring him back.”  
  
“Ken?” This time it was Lotso’s turn to laugh, softly, bitterly. “Well, ain’t that a surprise! Though I should have known better than to think a toy like that would be _loyal_. Mass-produced, they are! They know costs and profits better than any of the rest of us, though you wouldn’t believe it with their empty heads. Hell, even Lots O’ Hugging Bear here had a good long run. But you, cowgirl,” he sighed. “You’re handmade, you are. And that means you ain’t like the others here.”  
  
Her eyes narrowed. “What the hell’re you talkin’ ‘bout, Lotso?”  
  
“Come on up here,” he replied, gesturing with one pink paw to the desk, the chair. “You can lock that door if you want. Let’s you and me have a talk, first, and then we can finish this. Be... civilised.”  
  
‘Civilised’ was not a child’s word, but he was beginning to have his suspicions about what he had seen in her from the beginning. Coolly, Lotso watched as the cowgirl hesitated, then spun on her heel, turning back towards the door. A faint smile came to his lips as he watched her throw the string, hook over the door handle, then climb up high enough that she could lock the door before shinning back down again. She left the string there as she turned back towards him, hands at her sides as if she was ready to draw, then as she came close her body straightened, her chin tilted upwards, and she tried to stare him down.

“Civilised ain’t a word this place knows, Lotso,” she replied, and hearing her use the word sent a shiver down his spine. “But yeah, we can talk.”  
  
She swung up nimbly onto the chair, then onto the desk, where she would probably be just above eye-height with him when he was seated. He couldn’t help feeling a faint pang of jealousy as she moved with such agility; most toys nowadays, it seemed, did not move that well, and certainly he in his bulky, soft body had never been able to. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, that was why his mind worked so well instead.  
  
Jessie settled down to sitting cross-legged, her elbows on her knees with her forearms flopping down, her shoulders slightly hunched. It only seemed to intensify her glare further. He could feel her gaze as he slowly hauled himself up into the chair once again, made himself comfortable, and lay down his walking stick beside him before turning to her. Was that a glimpse of curiosity in her eyes? He felt sore, stiff, as if he had been in the bottom of a box of heavy toys for too long without the change for his stuffing to spread out again. Tired, as he had felt for so long now.  
  
“Well, Jessie,” he said finally. “Sometimes I wonder whether I ought to congratulate you. There haven’t been any others to do this, you know. Not even any who thought of it, I dare say.”  
  
“Am I supposed to be flattered?” Jessie replied with a quirk of an eyebrow. He chuckled.  
  
“Just sayin’. Just sayin’. Don’t you go worrying now. I just recognise a quick mind when I see it... wish I’d seen it earlier, that’s all I’ll say. But no, I ain’t expecting anything in particular from you at all. But all the same, remember it now. You’re the only one I’ve seen who thought of that. And that, I rather think... makes you a bit like me.”


	22. Chapter 22

She let him sit in the silence for a while, staring into her eyes. It felt distant, dreamlike, as if at any moment he would awaken and this would slip into the shadows that always made up dreams, great thoughts that never made it across the barrier to wakefulness.  
  
“Do you sometimes wonder which times you’re more alive?” said Jessie finally, her words cutting across him. She had leant one elbow on the table, her chin resting on her hands and muffling the words slightly, but what unnerved him most was her stillness. That wasn’t the Jessie he remembered. “Do you wonder whether you’re alive with humans... or away from them?”  
  
“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, hoarsely. It tasted like a lie.  
  
“Oh, I think you do, Woody. When there are humans playing with us, that’s when some of us think that we’re alive. Because the greatest thing we can do is belong to a kid, right? That’s what we’re _for_. We’re only toys, after all. But...”  
  
She let the word trail off.  
  
“Do you not wonder why we come awake in between, if that’s the case? Everyone longs to be played with, but they long to be away from the children as well. To interact as ourselves. Though I suppose Mr and Mrs Potatohead, well, they were meant to be together. And Andy did for you and Bo.”  
  
“Hey!” He almost shot to his feet, hampered by the table, anger rising in a flash. He pointed at Jessie with one shaking finger. “Don’t you go saying that about Bo and me.”  
  
She pushed his hand aside, something that might have been a cold version of a smile on her lips. “Whatever you say, cowboy. It don’t matter no more, anyhow. Two long years it’s been since Andy, and more ‘sides that since Bo. But my original question stands, Woody: are you more alive in children’s games, or out of them?”  
  
The anger abated, replaced by strange cold sensations that he did not even know the wording for. He felt like someone was reaching into him, no, pouring cold water into him, matting his stuffing and trickling into all the moving parts of his voicebox. Cold and heavy and... _tired_.  
  
“I don’t know,” he replied.  
  
Jessie got to her feet, her expression more sombre now, and walked round to stand beside him. Woody let his hands fall onto the table in front of him, plastic and still. He was used to hands; many toys were. It was hands that touched them, moved them, held them; human hands, child’s hands. His own were a poor imitation, it seemed. Flinching slightly as Jessie laid one hand on his shoulder, he nevertheless looked up as she spoke again.  
  
“Come with me.”  
  
Her voice was quiet, calmer now. Feeling like a puppet on a string, as if he was back in that 1950s show, Woody got to his feet and followed her, through to the back of the dollhouse, a kitchen with a table and cabinets and a miniature sink. It was so strange, moving through a world that was made in his size, like another dream.  
  
Woody gave a strangled cry as he saw Buzz, hanging limply from a plastic frame that had been set up in the middle of the room. With his friend’s name on his lips, he started forward, only for Jessie’s hand to press against his chest, to hold him still.  
  
“It’s all right, Woody,” she said.  
  
“What have you done to him?” He pushed her hand away, but she grabbed his arm with surprising strength, so tightly that his seams felt strained when he went to take a step forwards. Buzz’s head was hanging, his arms stretched out and upwards, his knees bent and unsupporting. “Buzz, what—“  
  
“He can’t hear you,” said Jessie, and as he fell still she finally released his arm. There was unmistakeable pain in her voice, the first that Woody had heard in many a year, and it stopped him cold. “It’s something we discovered by chance.”  
  
She walked over to Buzz; the light was a little dimmer in this room, and they looked like greyed-out shadows. Standing in front of him, she cupped his chin and tilted it up a little towards her, but Buzz’s eyes were closed, expression blank. When Jessie drew her hands away, his body shook slightly in the plastic scaffolding.

“I didn’t really know anything about batteries before. You and I don’t have them, Bullseye and Prospector never did, and between Andy and you we never needed to worry. The changes always happened before we ran out of battery, after all. It wasn’t until I was here that I... realised.”  
  
Her voice trailed off slightly as she paused, eyes fixed on Buzz’s face and expression softening almost infinitesimally. Fingers traced the line of his jaw, the little curl on his chin.  
  
“Sometimes it’s easier this way. When he wakes up, he doesn’t realise that he’s been gone. And he won’t remember us putting under.” Another pause. “He kept saying that you were going to come back, that you were going to save us.” Jessie’s hand dropped back to her side as she turned to glare at Woody, eyes flashing dangerously. “He still believes in you, you know. _All the time_ , he believed in you. And you never came back.”  
  
Her voice faltered, and she swallowed.  
  
“You never came back.”  
  
“I’m back now, Jessie,” he said. He reached up to rub the top of his head, looking at her cautiously as she turned away from him and walked over to the windows at the back of the kitchen. “I’m back. We can fix things now.”  
  
The laughter started low, almost a whisper, then grew to a grim rumble that echoed around the room. Jessie tapped her heel against the floor, leaving a mark from her spurs, then turned to look at Woody over her shoulder.  
  
“You just don’t get it, Woody, do you? You ain’t the Sherriff anymore, and this ain’t your town. You’d be better going back to wherever you’ve been.”  
  
“It doesn’t have to go on like this, Jessie.” He lunged forward and grabbed her arm, spinning her round to face him once again; for the first time, she did not shake him off. “It can _change_. We can change. Go back to how things were.”  
  
“I can’t forget like you can, Woody,” she replied. Her voice had fallen, become almost timid, and she sounded like she had when they had first met, when she had spoken about Emily. “I can’t forget like any of you, can’t tune it all out like puttin’ a radio to static. And ever since what Lotso said to me...” She shook her head. “I ain’t been able to sleep either. Not a night, not a day, not a moment. Sleep don’t come no more.”  
  
His hands slid up to her shoulders, gentler now, holding rather than gripping. “You just need to close your eyes, Jessie. Sometimes even the leader has to let go.”  
  
“I’m not their _leader_ , Woody,” Jessie snarled, like he was a fool all over again. “I’m their _owner_. Because they need one.”  
  
“You said once that we didn’t need owners, because we were going to the museum,” he replied. “You were surprised that I still had one.”  
  
Her hands came to rest against his chest; she pushed slightly, but without real force, then turned her face away from him and folded her arms across her chest. “You don’t get it. In here ain’t like out there. Toys always need to learn that, need to learn that here is better. They won’t get abandoned here.”  
  
Her shoulders shrugged slightly, almost throwing his hands aside. “But that doesn’t mean it has to be like this.”  
  
“You don’t know!” This time the shove was harder, sending him falling to the ground before he realised what was coming. Woody tried to scramble to his feet only to be kicked in the chest again; he grunted in pain and fell back, dragging himself backwards as Jessie advanced on him. “You’ve lived your charmed life these fifty years, Woody. Andy’s father and Andy and now wherever you’ve been. You’ve never been _abandoned_ or _thrown out_ , you’ve barely been _hurt_. You ain’t seen what the rest of us have seen.”  
  
“He was going–“ the words seemed to come from nowhere “--to put you – in the – ATTIC!”

Another kick, this one only catching his leg, and that lazily, but Jessie bent down over him with the light catching her face at ghastly angles. “You always thought the best, Woody, because that was all you ever got. But us? We ain’t had kind owners and good homes, we ain’t had your luck. And now I ain’t even got your blindness to the world. I see things how they are, and they – are not – good. And so...” her voice became quiet again, but dangerous. “So we end up here, the last place these toys ever come to. This is the end, Woody, it’s always been the end. And whoever rules it just becomes another gatekeeper.”


	23. Chapter 23

“Tell me where the others are,” he said quietly. Jessie looked up from where she was finishing tying his hands together, gave an unimpressed snort, and he felt the string tug tighter around his wrists. “Come on, Jessie. At least let me know what happened to them.”  
  
“So you can gather the old gang together?” Jessie leant back, one knee to the ground, the other bent up, one eyebrow raised pointedly. “Round us up and create one big playtime like you used to? Woody, don’t be such a fool.”  
  
He turned to look at her, pleading in his eyes. “Just so I know, Jess. Just so I know what happened to the toys I used to take care of.”  
  
This time there was a hesitation, and then she sighed. “You’ve seen me, and Buzz. Sneaking around in the vents, I don’t doubt you’ve seen Slink either. Rex lives with all the dinosaurs in the Butterfly Room, and he’s forgetting now. He’s happy.”  
  
There was, he feared, the faintest touch of disdain in the word. Then he heard himself think the word disdain and almost shuddered.  
  
“The Potato Heads... they disappeared before I managed to out Lotso. I reckon they’ve gone and hidden all their pieces somewhere. We still look sometimes, can’t find them though. Bullseye lives with me in the Butterfly. And Hamm...” she trailed off, the slightest of frowns coming to her features. Woody found himself wondering whether she knew.  
  
“Hamm came to me,” he said. She looked round sharply, eyes widening, and even as he felt a pricking in his eyes he forced himself to continue calmly. “The same little girl that took me home two years ago bought Hamm home the other day. That’s why I came back.”  
  
Jessie hesitated. “He wouldn’t come into the Butterfly Room with us. He kept finding some way to get back.”  
  
“He’s asleep now, Jessie.” Woody leant his head back against the cupboard that she had bound him to, shifting his wrists just slightly as if testing the knots, but knowing already that she would have tied them well. His jaw set, anger now rising alongside the sorrow. “That little girl that found me and took me home and took care of me, she tried to save him to. And I saw the state that he was in, Jessie.” Sharply he lunged forward as best he could in his bonds, bringing their faces just millimetres apart. She didn’t flinch. “You should be _ashamed_ of what happened to him.”  
  
“I did my best to help,” she hissed back. The brim of her hat was shadowing his face as well. “He wouldn’t take it.”  
  
“And why do you think that was? You think he was being contrary? Or perhaps he knew what he was doing was wrong.”  
  
This time, she did not reply. Scowling, Jessie got to her feet and turned towards the door that led from the room, slowing just momentarily to look across at Buzz.  
  
“If you knew Slink was there, why didn’t you give him somewhere to rest, Jessie?” he called after her. His voice rang around the small room and she stopped, with the final click of a spur against the floor. “Why did you leave him?”  
  
“There ain’t no one gonna disturb him there, Woody,” she replied, so quietly that he barely heard, and finally he found himself falling silent as she left the room, closing the door behind her.  
  
  
  
  
The room became silent, dark, still. Woody leant back into his bonds again; he was tied from wrist to elbow, yanking his shoulders back in a way that would have been painful for a human. It was only the whispering in his ear that he was a toy that stopped him from squirming against the angle. His legs had been similarly roped together, ankles up to knees, and sat against the ground he could get no purchase.

“Well, it’s been a while since we’ve been in this sort of mess, Buzz,” he said, almost conversationally. It gave him chills to see Buzz’s silhouette, slumping forward, limp; the words barely helped. “You and me both tied up, eh? Been... many years indeed. It was how we first met though. You remember that, Buzz?”  
  
His voice caught on the corners of the darkness. The darkness offered nothing in return.  
  
“Oh, who am I kidding... Can’t exactly say that we’ve been in worse scrapes, can I? So here we are. Sherriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear, sharing a doom. End of the story.” Hysteria began to creep into his words, his heels scraping together against the floor as he kicked angrily. “They never do the last episode, do they? Never – finish – the story!”  
  
“You’ll damage your boots there, cowboy.”  
  
For a moment he thought that he had imagined it. Woody’s head snapped up, his eyes going wide, falling immediately, and frightenedly, still. For a moment there was nothing, and he was about ready to blame it on his own breaking mind, when he saw Buzz’s head twitch slightly.  
  
“Can’t go damaging the Sherriff, can we?”  
  
“Buzz?” Again he strained, this time feeling the string bite into his stuffing, the stitching at his shoulders pull. “Buzz, is that you? How can it be? You’re supposed to be asleep!”  
  
“Who else would it be?” Okay, that was definitely Buzz. He watched as the space ranger’s hands curled slowly into fists. “I must say, this is rather different than anything Andy used to do to us.”  
  
Even though his words were slightly slurred, weary-sounding, Woody let go of the bubble of wild, relieved laughter that was building in his chest with every word he heard fall from the ranger’s lips. He threw his head back and let the laughter whoop out, a wild sound, but one that escaped too quickly into the room and made him rein it in again almost immediately. The silence returned again, less ominous now that he knew he shared it with a toy who was still awake, still with him.  
  
“She said that you slept, with your batteries removed.”  
  
“It is... strange,” Buzz admitted. “Like dreaming. I... have not wanted to wake, most of those times.”  
  
That, if nothing else, Woody could certainly understand. That desire to slip into sleep to hide some particularly rough behaviour by a child, even, or some threat, or some long week of loneliness when you were the only wakeful toy in the room and had been left behind when the family went skiing. Like now, the soft darkness wrapping at the corners of his mind, offering him the chance to become any other _item_ that did not need to see, and think, and hear.  
  
“Perhaps it’s time we both woke up,” said Woody, the words a little soft and a little bitter..  
  
He heard Buzz draw in a sharp breath, and tried not to wonder why it was that they breathed when they were made of plastic, fabric or ceramic.  
  
“Perhaps you’re right, cowboy,” he finally replied.  
  
And hearing those words, in that voice, bought just a touch of hope back into his heart.


	24. Chapter 24

“There has to be a way out.”  
  
It was him that said the words, as always; even when the others were despairing, Woody always knew that there would be a way out. No matter how wild the story, no matter how much it looked like the bad guys were going to win, the Sheriff always won in the end.  
  
But his bonds were so tight that they squeezed his stuffing together. He could barely move beneath them, could not release himself from the cabinet to which he was tied, though his breathing became laboured with the attempts to do so. Buzz – stronger than the rest of them, he remembered, powerful enough to throw them aside, or to lift a whole train into the air and fly away with it – tugged and strained at his own loops, then fell still again, looking up at his wrist thoughtfully.  
  
“There has to be a way...”  
  
The second time he said it, or perhaps the third, or fourth, the words trailed off to a whisper in the room. Woody gave up on trying to twist round and reach the knots with his teeth, and looked up to his friend.  
  
“Hey, Buzz,” a touch of jocularity found his voice. “You reckon you could pull that thing over?”  
  
“I doubt it,” replied Buzz, still serious. “It appears to have been wired into the building, and takes on its structural soundness. However, an idea has occurred to me.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“The Potato Heads were capable of moving their pieces even when disassembled. When I was in Sid’s house all those years ago, I was not able to use my arm when it was not connected to me. I am wondering whether that was simply a matter of not realising that I could.”  
  
Woody thought of his own detached arm, in those tumultuous days when he had first met Jessie, and grimaced at the memory. It was only when he realised, perhaps a moment too late, what Buzz intended to do, that his eyes went wide and he lunged forward in his ties, feeling his seams strain. “No, Buzz, don’t-“  
  
But the space ranger had already twisted his body sharply, causing his left arm to pop free of its joint once again. He had been concerned about its being weakened in the past, Woody remembered. Buzz gave a grunt – pain? Concentration? – and for a moment the arm hung there, still on the end of its wire. Then the fingers twitched, the wrist rotated, and Woody’s jaw dropped into a disbelieving smile as the arm crept up along the wire, bending it back on itself, until it reached the top.  
  
“You did it! Buzz, you did it!”  
  
“Affirmative, cowboy,” Buzz replied, but his voice sounded tight, through gritted teeth. The arm unlooped itself from the wire and then dropped back down to the floor, Buzz panting as he let it lie and leant to his right side to gain enough leverage to undo the wire there as well. Within moments he was free and kneeling beside Woody, tugging at the string with his one hand until everything was loose enough for Woody to wriggle free, retrieve a boot cast off in the struggle, and pat his stuffing back towards its proper shape.  
  
It was only when he looked up to see Buzz holding his detached arm that a strange pang ran through him. Buzz’s expression was a weary uncertainty, looking at the separated part of himself.  
  
“Here, let me have a look,” said Woody. Buzz started, then nodded and handed his arm across, shuddering slightly as Woody ran his hand over the shoulder joint. “Can you feel that?” he asked quietly.  
  
“I didn’t realise that I would,” Buzz replied.  
  
Woody swallowed, but could not think of words to offer. He had not seen how Buzz’s arm had been reattached all those years ago, and did not understand modern, complex toys so well as he supposed he ought. All he could really do, he supposed, was to take his best bet; he took a firm hold of Buzz’s shoulder and the upper part of the arm, and pushed them back together again, feeling a resistance that gave way with a pop as the arm snapped back into place. Buzz gave a gasp and wavered slightly, and Woody worried for a moment that he would have to try – and most likely fail – to catch him, then Buzz took hold of himself again, stretching the arm in front of him and flexing the wrist and fingers.

He looked round with something like a smile. “Good work, Woody.”  
  
“No problem,” Woody replied. “Now, is there an exit to this room anywhere? A cupboard? Some furniture to hide beneath?”  
  
“There’s a low chair at the rear of the room,” said Buzz. “But you would be seen on the cameras before you managed to get under there. Besides, Kong is watching outside as well.”  
  
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s just what I was planning on.”  
  
  
  
“Hey, muscles!”  
  
The cowboy boot rebounded off Kong’s head and bounced back to beneath the window that Woody was leaning out of. Kong turned with a snort and a look of surprise.  
  
“Yeah, you! Why don’t you come and get me, you big lump?”  
  
Another, rather more huffed, grunt did for an answer, then Kong grabbed a small ball from behind itself and bounced it forcefully on the floor. Woody’s eyes went wide as he hauled his boot back in through the window and fled through to the back of the house, where Buzz was waiting beside a window big enough for both of them to get through.  
  
He heard the door slam open moments later, waiting carefully and holding his breath. He could faintly see Buzz’s outline in the shadows across from him. The sounds of boots on the floor told him that he was right to think that Jessie would come, and he tightened the rope in his hands as she came into view, appearing at the window and scanning the area outside. Her eyes narrowed as she caught sight of the boots beneath the chair, and she put one foot onto the windowsill to climb out.  
  
The lasso wrapped neatly around her waist as Woody jumped out from the back corners of the room, barefoot now and with rolls of string over his shoulder. As Jessie fell back he wrapped another loop of the string around her legs, pulling her to the floor and straddling her back. His hand muffled her scream, though he heard movement outside that had to be Kong.  
  
“Go!” he hissed to Buzz, and with a reluctant nod the space ranger ran for the front door. Jessie struggled beneath him, and then her head turned fiercely sideways to knock his hand away. Her elbow jabbed up beneath the bonds, burying itself in his side and throwing him to the right, and then she was upon him. Her fist connected with his face, and between the stars he saw her teeth bared and eyes glinting. Woody fought back, both of them struggling, kicking and punching, and he felt teeth sink into his shoulder as the string threatened to tangle them both together. He couldn’t hear anything beyond their fight, could not think to speak and did not hear Jessie do anything but growl faintly in return until, just as she was pinning him to the ground and slamming the heel of her hand into his face over and over, she was grabbed and hauled away and upwards with a holler of surprise.  
  
“Woody!” Buzz said, but it came out a grunt as he wrapped his arms around Jessie and lifted her off the ground, her legs kicking wildly. Woody grabbed the string from the floor once again and looped it around Jessie’s body, this time pulling it tight around her calves before stringing it around her middle.  
  
Buzz lowered her gently to the ground, then reached to pick up the hat that had fallen from her head in her fight. As Woody put one hand to his ringing ears, Buzz knelt down in front of Jessie’s still-squirming form, looking at her with sadness in his gaze until she fell still, breathing hard and glaring up towards him.  
  
“I’m sorry, Jess,” he said, voice soft. “I didn’t want it to be this way.”  
  
“You said you were on my side,” she spat.  
  
“What I do, I do for you.”  
  
Anger, betrayal, roared in her eyes and the curling snarl of her lip, without even a sound needing to pass her lips. She lunged upwards, almost reaching him, only for Woody to grab her shoulders and pin her in a sitting position instead, pulling the base of her neck back against his knee. Jessie did not look round, though, did not tear her gaze away from Buzz, who stood with torment written across his features.  
  
“Get a chair, Buzz,” said Woody. “It’s time we had a little talk.”


	25. Chapter 25

She went stiff, unwilling, in their arms. Buzz did his best, found a chair with arms to prop her into, so that they could use the string to tie her into a position which Woody hoped would have at least a fragment of dignity about it. All the while, though, her eyes never closed, and remained a burning green accusation against them both.  
  
Once, Buzz tried to reach out, to stroke her cheek. She turned her face away, and Woody could not bear to see the pain on his face.  
  
Finally, she sat, arms and legs braced against those of the chair, chin held high to level her gaze at them. Woody was struck again by those antique dolls that he had once seen, all soft curls and hard faces, but there hands had not flexed and straightened in agonising slowness in the way that Jessie’s did.  
  
Woody crossed his arms loosely across his chest, awkwardly, then unfolded them again and placed one hand in his hip in that comfortable old position. “Was it Lotso, Jess? You said that he talked to you. Was it him, made you like this?”  
  
Jessie’s lips curved in a smile, but it seemed cold, distant. Even the second Buzz Lightyear which he had once seen had not been this _alien_ to him. “You think that’s it, Woody? Find out what he said, argue against it, and suddenly I’ll realise everything’s all right again? It ain’t like that. He didn’t _tell_ me things, he made me _realise_ them.”  
  
“Realise what, Jessie?” He pressed.  
  
She laughed then, hard and bitter, throwing her head back. Buzz winced, and for a moment Woody reached out to touch the ranger gently on the shoulder before his hand was shrugged away. “I’ve told you already, Woody, you ain’t gonna understand. You don’t remember it all, every day, every night, every _year_. Every kid grows up and becomes an adult, but us? We never grow up, never stop needing kids. We grow old without ever growing up, Woody.”  
  
Buzz turned his face away, but Woody stayed. Jessie was right; she had already spoken those words to him. But there was a haughtiness in her voice, an assumption that he would never understand what she spoke about, no matter that they were only the same age as each other. His expression softened as he felt a well of sadness bubble up in him, and he stepped forwards to place his hands on her cheeks. Just once, she tried to tug away, then caught his gaze and stopped. He could see his own pained look reflected in her eyes, wondered whether she saw herself in his.  
  
“I know,” he said.  
  
For a moment, that was all. Jessie’s manic smile faded, slipped away.  
  
“You asked, about Andy’s father? His name was Walter. He had an older brother called Timothy, and Timothy preferred to play cops and robbers but Walter always loved cowboys, just by themselves, never even with Indians. So Timothy let there be one cowboy on the side of his cops whenever they went to bust the bad guys. And then when Walter got older, he still liked cowboys, and when his mother said he was getting too old for toys he refused to give up the one toy that he’d had for the longest...”  
  
He could see in her eyes that she knew what was coming.  
  
“Me. And he took me, and some of the others too, and begged for us to stay in the attic rather than get thrown right away. And so me, and Slink, and some of the others spent all that time in the attic, until we got to come down again when Andy was born.”  
  
“I said you’d lived a charmed life, Woody,” she said. Her voice cracked, lower lip trembling slightly, but he could see the tension throughout the rest of her body. “Most of us, we ain’t had owners like that. We ain’t that lucky.”  
  
“It ain’t all about luck,” he replied, softly. His thumbs stroked her cheeks gently, feeling how worn the paint was, how old she felt beneath his hands. “Me and Slink, we still spent a hella long time up in that attic. We just trusted Walter, you know? Trusted that he’d bring us back down one day.”

“Children grow up, Woody.”  
  
“Individual children do.” The words felt long and foreign on his tongue, but they stirred in his mind like he was recalling friends. Dusty flickers of memory rose: sitting over Walter’s desk through middle school, high school, homework and essays. Watching as the adult world claimed the child-that-had-been. “But there will never be a world without children, Jessie. Children will never stop existing.”  
  
She shook her head, tried to throw off his hands, but he kept them in place even when she turned her head and stared off, into the dark ceiling, over his shoulder. “You didn’t used to talk like this, Woody. You never stopped talking ‘bout going back to Andy.”  
  
“Two years is a long time, Jessie.”  
  
He could see the slightest flicker in her eyes each time that he used her name, could hear the way that her voice softened just slightly each time that she used is. So he kept using her name, impressing it back upon her, wondering whether it had stopped meaning something after it had been used for too long and the children in this place had not known it, had called her by different names.  
  
“Not long compared to sixty.”  
  
There it was, the reminder of how old they were. Woody could feel it, a heavier weight than his voicebox.  
  
“Walter was thirty-four when he died.”  
  
The words came out before he could stop himself, and he felt his body tremble at the admission. Because it _hurt_ , hurt like nothing he had ever felt, hurt more than the physical ripping of stitches or crushing or twisting of his limbs ever could have done. That darkness, when he had huddled up close to Slink when he cried, because there was no-one else that was old enough to remember Walter, to understand, to know that Walter had once been a child as well and not just an adult to fear and shy away from.  
  
And now Slink slept too, and Woody was the only one left that remembered.  
  
“I don’t forget, Woody,” Jessie bit out, the words clipped and harsh. Once again, her gaze met his, but it had gone cold, unreadable. “Not even for a short while, not even until it gets a little blurred. I remember _everything_.”  
  
“Now? So do I.” He saw the catch of breath in her throat, felt her tense beneath his hands. “It’s still there, Jess. I just didn’t think about it. I just concentrated on Andy, on being Andy’s toy... and then these last two years I’ve been Bonnie’s toy, and it feels so good, Jessie, so good to be alive again, to just _live_. Because, Jessie, my owners might have never sent me away, but they have been taken from me, and you can’t be thinking that’s somehow easy.”


	26. Eighteen Months Earlier

“What do you mean, that makes me like you?”  
  
He had thought that she would tell him to go to hell, or at least whatever the equivalent was in the world of toys and children. Go back to his box, perhaps. Go to sleep. But instead, the cowgirl’s eyes narrowed as she watched him, and Lotso shifted to settle his stuffing more comfortably.  
  
“You an’ me both, cowgirl, we’ve had rough lives. Thinking we had owners who loved us, only for it to turn out that they don’t care so much after all. Yours grew up, mine just didn’t even notice when I was gone. You know how long a toy lasts, on average? Not long. You and your kind, the old ones, you’re a rarity. Thousands of toys get thrown away. Broken. Destroyed by the very children that they love.”  
  
Her eyes are green, still bright, although rough wear is starting to give them just a touch of dullness. Lotso had seen some toys so badly worn that their eyes had turned white, like old, blind human eyes, and those who knew of such had been blinded as well. They didn’t realise that it doesn’t really matter, that it was all in their minds what they could do.  
  
“You’ve been keeping these toys like slaves, Lotso. That ain’t right.”  
  
“They are like children.” He waved his walking stick in demonstration, anger rising in his chest. “They don’t understand! You know what’s in this head? Stuffing and stitches! Not one of us has a brain like humans do! But we talk an’ walk an’ think all the same! Who says that’s the limit of what we can do? Of what we can be?”  
  
His voice had risen into the words. There was something in her gaze now as she watched him, as she did not reply. She had been living rough for months now, no contact with children to keep her feeling like a toy. He knew it. He knew, as well, what that was like. He knew that she’d been plotting, not thinking like a toy in a game about how to be the hero or defeat him, but thinking in true tactics and true plans. No gaol for the wrongdoers: she had destroyed his people, and unable to even consider continuing to exist they had winked out like snuffed candles.  
  
“I know you’ve heard my story. Daisy, losing me and the others, not caring as long as we were replaced for her. An’ I’ve heard yours from your folk, what Emily went and did to you.”  
  
A slight tense ran through her at the name of her old owner. Lotso seized upon it, knowing that he held her rapt.  
  
“Children just don’t care about us, the way that we feel about them. So why do we? Why do we tie ourselves to them, trusting them to keep us well, when they don’t even know it? We can’t let them know, it’s too dangerous. So why shouldn’t I take care of these toys instead?”  
  
“What you do ain’t caring, Lotso.”  
  
“Only ‘cos they don’t realise it, _Jessie_.” She had been using his name throughout, but that was one thing that humans had right: names were powerful. Now, he slipped her in, in return, her own name, and watched the flicker in her eyes. “They don’t understand how humans are, not like you and I do. They got their pretty views of the world, and that’s what I feed them, like I told you when you came here. And I do my best to protect them, and they make of that what they will.”  
  
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”  
  
He shrugged, gentle now, and placed both hands on the top of his staff. “Well, now that I can’t figure for you. You’ll just need to decide that for yourself.”


	27. Chapter 27

“I said I wouldn’t do what he did,” said Jessie. Her voice had grown quieter now, and her chin slumped towards her chest where she sat, still tied in place. Woody was too wary to let her loose just yet. He crouched at her feet, hands in front of him, looking up in her face though she refused to meet his eyes. Buzz was somewhere behind him, but Woody did not at this instant have the strength to turn and take on that pain as well. “I said I’d make sure that they knew what I was doing for them... those that could understand. So many of them couldn’t.”  
  
“We’re just toys, Jessie. It’s who we are. Can’t go denying it.”  
  
Her lower lip trembled. “Being a toy went and hurt me, Woody. I didn’t want to be a toy no more, didn’t want to be owned. And if I could protect the others by being their owner, then so be it. I won’t throw them away, won’t go and grow up on them. It’s for them, Woody.”  
  
Jessie was shaking, trembling so much that he could see it without even reaching out to touch her. More than that, however, he could hear her using his name, the name that she had denied him for so long now. She knew that it was him, had done all along perhaps, but now he could hear her saying it and it gave him just a touch of hope.  
  
“And that’s good, Jessie. That’s real good. But the cupboards and the boxes and the guards? That ain’t right.”  
  
He reached out and put one hand gently on her knee, but she jerked as if burned and nearly toppled the chair over. Woody rocked back on his heels, waiting for her to settle again, but Jessie was shaking like a dam about to break, and he was not sure what would be on the other side of it. One more time, he put his hand against her thigh, and this time she did not draw away from it. Her fabric had felt so fresh and crisp the first time that he had met her – but then again, he supposed that came from so long in storage compared to him. Now it felt worn, smooth.  
  
Behind them, Buzz shifted his weight, and Woody felt a pang as for a moment he wondered if he was an intruder here, breaking in between them. He would never want that. Jessie was as dear to him as Slink, perhaps close to being as dear to him as Andy. But he could see that what she and Buzz had was very different.  
  
“I was so afraid,” Jessie whispered. The words caught Woody by surprise, and he looked up to see that her head was bowed, lips trembling as if she was about to cry. But they could not cry, never could. “If they left. If they threw me out. If I got damaged. I had to protect them, Woody.”  
  
“But you gotta let them live. Remember back at Andy’s, when we used to come out while he was at school? You asked me earlier whether I was more alive with toys or with humans. Well, I got an answer for you.” At that, she looked up and finally, _finally_ met his gaze. Woody gave a faint, sad smile. “It’s both, Jessie. We gotta have both to keep us whole.”  
  
For a moment, he wondered whether the words had sunk in at all: Jessie did not react, just watching him with unblinking eyes and unbreathing chest. Then her head sagged, and she looked away again. “I’m so tired.” Her hands clenched and unclenched in her bonds. “So tired of it all. But I can’t stop now that I’ve started.”  
  
“Then don’t stop.” Those words were Buzz’s, and Woody looked up as the Space Ranger walked across to them. Buzz cradled Jessie’s face in his hands and lifted her chin to face him, and for a moment a beatific hope flickered in her features. “ _Change_.”  
  
“It’s too late.” She wrenched away from Buzz’s touch, and he flinched as if he had been struck. Jessie turned a furious gaze on Woody once again. “You left, and this place just kept on going. Someone had to stop Lotso, that’s all there was. And now you’re here to stop me, is that right?” Anger strung through her voice, harsh as he had ever heard it, and Jessie leaned as far forwards as she could in her bonds to look into Woody’s eyes. “Just do it.”  
  
Suddenly, her words turned pleading.  
  
“Let me _go_.”


	28. Chapter 28

“Isn’t that it?” Jessie’s eyes, so wide that white showed all of the way around, seemed to be staring straight through him. Her hands tightened around the arms of the chair until the plastic seemed to pale with the stress, and she leaned forward until the back legs almost left the ground. “Have you come to let me go, Woody?”  
  
Woody felt as if he was full of water, heavy and slow, as he stumbled back and had to catch himself with his hands to avoid falling ass-first on the floor. All that he could see in his eye was Hamm, and Slink, and the other toys that had gone while they were in the attic long ago. What had been dusty memories were becoming clearer, sharpening in focus, and still he could not imagine what it must be that made the look in Jessie’s eyes.  
  
“I ain’t slept in a year and a half.” Her voice was soft, almost lulling with need, in contrast to the ferocity of her movements. “All I see is the darkness and the danger and the pull of time like a weight. Let me go, Woody. Please.” The word trembled, like the breaking of a song, and Jessie held for a long pause. “Kill me.”  
  
“No!” It came from him fierce and fast, and he almost lunged upwards, drawing to his knees and grabbing Jessie’s hands where they were tied to the wood. “Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that, Jessie, not now, not ever.” Buzz was not speaking; why not? How could he not, when Jessie spoke like this? If Woody had been human, he was sure, his heart would have been pounding in his chest as Jessie’s electric green eyes bored into him and her hand refused to soften to his touch. But he did not let go. “That’s not what I came for, Jessie. It can always get better. There’s always hope.”  
  
“Did things get better here, Woody?” She cocked her head, stance coiled and ready even though she was tied down. He wondered if he could still completely flop like other toys. “I tried. But they never would. It doesn’t matter if you get rid of Lotso. There’s hundreds of toys and they’re all so lost and uncontrolled, and you try to keep them safe and you end up caging them. Because a cage keeps danger out, doesn’t it?  
  
“I hated that cage.” Her voice turned bitter. He wondered if it was helping at all, or if it was making things worse, and realised that he did not even know how he would find out. “Hated most of all that they had Buzz guarding us.” For a moment, Jessie’s eyes flickered to Buzz, but Woody did not dare look away from her to see how the space ranger was reacting. “Because I knew Buzz wouldn’t do that to me.”  
  
Jessie had struggled with the toy box at times; they had all seen that. It had been easier because there were others in with her, because they could move around and talk at night, and because Buzz had provided a little light for them all to see by. But her ability to cope had barely been able to keep up with the longer and longer hours they spent in the box. When Woody finally joined them in there – the last toy to do so, the final sign – she had cried through the night.  
  
“It wasn’t you,” she said to Buzz. He reached out one hand to her, uncertainly, and she tilted her head into his palm. It almost frightened Woody more than her anger had, seeing her so pained. “What they did, what they made, was not you. You are more than that.” Her eyes closed for a moment, and he would have thought that she was falling asleep but for what she had told them. “A toy, not just a piece of plastic. We’re all being more than we are.”  
  
Her words went beyond him, into some murky space where he could feel the thoughts but not quite put words around them. They were too powerful to trap into language. But Woody could feel enough of them to know that they were large, and powerful, and frightening. They were the sort of thoughts that were too big for toys, the sort that could...  
  
That could drive them mad.

He’d felt thoughts like that, on the edge of his mind, when Walter had died. Clinging to Slink had made it easier to chase them away, to be able to sleep again and wake again in turn. And there had been Andy.  
  
“When were you last a toy, Jessie?” she didn’t look round as Woody spoke, but he saw her lips tremble minutely. “When did you last join in the playtime? Or have you been hiding yourself away?”  
  
“It ain’t hiding.” She still didn’t look round, but her hands half-clenched again. “If I get damaged, if I... die, what happens to them? What happens to the others?”  
  
“You and me, we’re tough sorts, Jessie. Me without my hat and you with your short hair. We ain’t that breakable.”  
  
“You can lead them now, can’t you?” _Now_ she turned to him, and her eyes were glassy green and scratched and brighter than any human’s eyes he’d ever seen. “You can replace me.”  
  
“It ain’t about replacing. Andy didn’t replace Walter, nor Emily.” Walter’s name hurt to say, and he could see that Emily’s hurt Jessie, but he had to say them all the same. “Bonnie didn’t replace Andy. And I ain’t replacing you.”  
  
He could start to feel an idea, somewhere deep down in his voicebox, in his stuffing. A memory of a hat on his head, Buzz’s laser glinting off his badge, and all the stories that they used to live. Woody straightened up, having to tell himself that his knees would not creak no matter how old he felt, and looked to Buzz. “Buzz, I’m just gonna be a short while. I’ll be back, I promise.” He glanced over Jessie one more time. “Take off those spurs. We don’t need metal when we’ve got our minds.”  
  
“Where are you going?” It was Buzz that asked.  
  
“First...” Woody reached up and ran one hand over his head. “To get my hat.”


	29. Chapter 29

_The doors to the saloon swung open. Everyone turned to stare, even the piano player falling silent._  
  
_Carefully, the barmaid put down the glass she was cleaning, and glanced around the bar. “Can I help you, sir?” she said._  
  
_The stranger walked across the floor, the spurs of his boots clicking with every step. He was tall, lean, with a ten-gallon hat pulled down to cover his features. Dusty jeans, a plaid shirt. Every eye in the place watched as he crossed to the bar and leant on it, then finally looked up to meet the barmaid’s eye._  
  
_“Water,” he said. “Neat.”_  
  
_The barmaid nodded, and hurried to get him his drink. As she passed the piano player, she gave him a nod. “Play it, Ken,” she said._  
  
_“Sure thing, Barbie.”_  
  
_He turned back to his piano, and as he began to play again the atmosphere went back to how it had been. Twinkle, twinkle little star rolled across the saloon. The stranger downed his drink in one, to the shocked glances of the folks watching, and put the shotglass down on the bar again._  
  
_“Another, doll,” he said._  
  
_“Sure thing,” said Barbie. She was wearing one of them fancy get-ups, bright blue-green, and the stranger cast an appreciative eye over her as she got him another drink. From the piano, Ken glanced their way, but did not say anything. The guns on the stranger’s hips were shining bright._  
  
_Barbie’s hands shook as she got the second drink and put it on the bar in front of the stranger. Lightning-fast, his hand shot out and caught hold of her wrist, above the old injuries to her hand where the horse had trodden on her fingers. She gave a gasp and tried to pull away, but the man held tight._  
  
_Chairs scraped on the wooden floor as people started to their feet. She was loved round here, was Barbie, and there wasn’t a man or woman or snake in town that wouldn’t stand up for her. Kong growled low in his hominin chest as he stood up, reaching for the empty bottle on the table beside him. The stranger glanced sideways, but did not turn his head. His hand twitched towards his gun._  
  
_“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a commanding voice. The doors to the saloon swung open again, and this time the stranger did turn to see the man there._  
  
_“And who are you to be saying that?” said the stranger._  
  
_The newcomer stepped forwards. The light glinted off his shoulders. “I’m Buzz Lightyear, and I’m the law enforcement around these parts.”_  
  
_“Well, Mister Lightyear,” drawled the stranger, sauntering over with his hands still readied near his hips. “I don’t see no sheriff’s badge.”_  
  
_Buzz’s chin tilted higher, defiantly. “I’m the deputy, and that’s law enough. Now are you going to come quietly, or am I going to have to take you in?”_  
  
_“Take me in on what?”_  
  
_Buzz pointed to the WANTED poster on the wall. It showed the man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, wearing his brown hat at a rakish angle. Beneath, it said WOODY PRIDE – DINOSAUR RUSTLING - $ELEVENTYTHOUSAND. “We’ve been missing a few dinosaurs around these parts. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”_  
  
_The corner of Woody’s mouth curled up into a smile. “And what if I do?”_  
  
_His hand still hung beside the gun on his hip. Buzz’s eyes narrowed, but he did not back down from the gaze piercing into his. The deputy’s hands twitched._  
  
_“Our sheriff doesn’t take kindly to dinosaur rustling.”_  
  
_Woody cocked his head slightly, the hat shadowing his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see no sheriff.”_  
  
_He jumped to the side, drawing both pistols, as Buzz raised his laser and fired. A bottle above the bar shattered, and one of the Bratz screamed as glass rained down. Barbie threw herself to the side, grabbing the bat that she kept under the bar but staying out of the way for now. Once, twice, Woody fired, his shots missing as Buzz somersaulted over one of the tables and landed perfectly, raising his laser again. The townsfolk fled._  
  
_“Put down your weapon!” Buzz shouted._  
  
_Woody’s response was another shot, this one glancing off his shoulderplates and shattering the lamp on top of the piano. With a final dissonant chord, Ken gave up on trying to play._  
  
_Buzz’s eyes narrowed as he trained his laser sight firmly on the cowboy’s chest. “What happened to you, Pride?” he said. “You were a good sheriff in your town. What happened to your people?”_

 _“Catch me,” said Woody, “and find out.”_  
  
_Before Buzz could fire again, he leapt out through the front window of the saloon. It shattered around him, but he landed on one knee before looking up, hat not even dislodged, and preparing to run. It seemed that he hesitated for a moment, perhaps thinking that this would be the moment when the sheriff of Sunnyside Town came for him, but it seemed that it was not to be today._  
  
_Woody rose to his feet and turned right even as Buzz burst out through the saloon doors again. “Hold there!” the ranger called. “You won’t be getting far!”_  
  
_“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”_  
  
_“Our guard snakes,” said Buzz. He pointed behind Woody, where a huge green snake uncoiled. It was easily eight feet across and a eleventy long, and waved back and forth with a defiant hiss, teeth shining._  
  
_But Woody did not seem to be phased. He just smiled again, and gave Buzz a sly look. “You think that can stop me?” He put his fingers and whistled, long and loud._  
  
_The ground rumbled beneath them, and Cindy from the ranch screamed and clutched her baby to her chest as her husband Action Man fought to hold her. Even the snake looked uncertain. Then a great flying saucer, papery-white, rose up out of the ground, sending dust and dirt showering down around it. At the controls, looking out, were three little green men, each three-eyed and grinning. A silver claw dangled from the base of the spacecraft._  
  
_The snake lunged for Woody, but before it could reach him the spacecraft swung down and wrapped its claw around the snake’s body. The snake snapped and hissed, its teeth only inches from Woody’s face, but he just raised one eyebrow at the fangs before turning back to Buzz again. He still had one pistol in each hand, six bullets still in each. “What now, deputy?”_  
  
  
  
  
  
Moonlight cut a bright line across the floor of the room. The toys, assembled in the dollhouses, or in cardboard boxes with windows hastily cut into them, watched with bated breath. In the makeshift street, Buzz and Woody faced each other.  
  
Woody snuck a glance towards the dreamhouse, at the end of the road. A sign saying ‘Sherriff’s Officce’ had been found to tape to the front. There were no _children_ here, nobody to bring _original_ thoughts to this story. All that they could do was piece together the stories they had lived before.  
  
  
  
  
  
_Buzz’s eyes just narrowed. The fingers of his right hand, onto the wrist of which his laser blasted was strapped, twitched slightly._  
  
“What now, deputy?” Woody repeated. “You gonna call your critter friends for help?”  
  
  
  
  
Woody’s Round-Up. That had been a story, once.  
  
  
  
  
  
_”Maybe I will,” the deputy said._  
  
There was a slam as the door to the Sherriff’s Officce opened. A figure stood there, red hat cocked, boots shining despite the dusty ground. All eyes turned to her as she paused, then looked up with a smile and shining, bright green eyes.  
  
“Or maybe he ain’t gonna have to.”


	30. Chapter 30

Jessie stood proudly in the moonlight. And it was _Jessie_ , her smile true and her eyes bright even if there was no way to put the colour back in her cheeks or her hair back into its signature braid. Woody’s sheriff’s badge, removed from his own waistcoat, was pinned to her chest. It shone.  
  
If Woody’s chest had held a heart, he was sure that it would have soared. As it was, he struggled to maintain his role, pieces of drinking straw in his hand for guns, a slip of tissue around his neck for a bandana. Jessie strode down the street like a sheriff ready to clean up her town, head held high, immersed in the story as fully as he had hoped she would be.  
  
“We don’t take well to dinosaur rustlin’ round these parts,” she said, “and you ain’t no exception. Tell us where you took the T-Rex.”  
  
“Never,” said Woody.  
  
Jessie’s eyes narrowed, but they did not lose their spark. “Well” she said, then it looks like we’ll just have to take you in.”  
  
A lasso appeared in her hands. It was not there, was no more real than the guns or the piano or the glass bottles of the bar, but Woody could _see_ it as she drew back the rope, whirling it above her head, then threw it overarm. It wrapped around him, and if he closed his eyes then he could feel it draw tight even if he looked down to see thin air. He allowed himself a cry as he was pulled to the ground, and then Jessie and Buzz both ran over to him where he struggled in his bonds. Jessie planted a foot on his chest to hold him still.  
  
“Now, pardner,” she said, “how about you answer me some questions?”  
  
Woody opened his mouth to answer, but before he could there were heavy footsteps on one of the chairs, and a figure appeared triumphantly above them.  
  
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Missy.”  
  
Woody could just about crane his head far enough to see Mr. Potato Head standing on the arm of the chair. He had a paperclip in his hand, one end bent out like an antenna, and one of his eyes had been removed. He had not been part of the game that Woody had planned.  
  
There was not even a hesitation from Jessie. “One-Eyed Bart!”  
  
“The very same,” said Mr. Potato Head, and added an evil laugh for good measure. He pointed the paperclip – the _controller_ – in his hand towards Woody. “And you can’t stop me!”  
  
He pressed a button on the controller, and Woody burst out from the rope holding him in place. Jessie was thrown off as he jumped to his feet, landing with one hand to the ground before looking up towards them. His pistols had fallen to the ground, but they were right at his hands again, and he scooped them both up as he rose to his feet, pointing one at Buzz and one at Jessie.  
  
“Whichever one of you shoots,” said Woody, “the other dies.”  
  
“He’s being mind-controlled by One-Eyed Bart!” said Buzz.  
  
Jessie’s brow furrowed for a moment as she sought the answer. “My badge,” she said, like a realisation. Her left hand twitched towards it, but Woody mimed readying the pistol pointed towards Buzz, and he fell still again. “It has mind-control-blocking powers. If we can get it on him-”  
  
“That won’t happen,” said Mr. Potato Head, from above them. “You will never defeat me when I have Sheriff Woody for a weapon!”  
  
Woody wasn’t sure how deeply into the story Mr. Potato Head was, how much of this was improvisation or how much was feeling the flow of the narrative. He himself felt almost too aware of the difference, as if Jessie’s words had woken those all-too-grown up thoughts that had started to form in his mind as Walter grew older, in those days before Andy was really old enough to be the one telling the stories. Bonnie’s toys thought of themselves like this, like an acting troupe, but they never consciously took on the roles without Bonnie to guide them.

He and Buzz were the ones telling this story. He hoped that these thoughts, and all of the terrors deep in them, were not coming to Buzz as well.  
  
Jessie was still frozen, hands at her side. She was not even wearing holsters, but if Woody let his mind cloud over just a little he could see them there, below her readied hands, the mother-of-pearl in the handles of her guns glinting in the bright sunlight of high noon. Because these showdowns were _always_ at high noon, even if they were in the moonlight.  
  
“Don’t do it, Jessie!” said Buzz, and Woody realised with a pang that he did not know what Buzz meant. He couldn’t see that part of the story any more.  
  
“I gotta, Buzz,” she replied, just a little desperate but plenty fierce. Just as a cowgirl should be. “He saved me once. I gotta do the same for him.”  
  
She darted forwards, pulling the badge from her chest, and the toys around them were watching with bated breath to see both how the story would play out and how Jessie – the real Jessie, the toy, their owner – would act now. As she ran, Buzz raised his laser, and true to his words Woody raised the pistol pointed at Jessie – and pulled the trigger.  
  
For a moment, he could feel the recoil kick in his hand, smell the gunpowder. The world seemed to go slow-motion as he fired, Jessie reaching him and lunging forwards to pin the badge to his chest just as the bullet left the barrel, spiralling through the air, going right through Jessie’s heart.  
  
She hit him harder, harder than cloth and stuffing should have felt, knocking him to the ground again. Jessie was still breathing, her eyes wide and surprised, but his badge was back on his chest again and for all that he knew it was a bit of gold-painted tin he could _feel_ the rush that came from having it there.  
  
An instant later, Buzz was skidding down to his knees next to them, rolling Jessie into his arms with more tenderness than a deputy for his sheriff. Woody grabbed the gun from the holster on Jessie’s hip – invisible, nothing but story in his hands, but real enough – and rolled to one knee, taking sight on Mr. Potato Head.  
  
“You’ve controlled your last, One-Eyed Bart,” he said. He fired, and the paperclip sprung out of Mr. Potato Head’s hand and cut such an arc that he could almost believe it had been knocked out by a bullet.  
  
A vengeful finger was pointed in his direction. “You haven’t seen the last of me, Woody Pride,” said Mr. Potato Head, still in his most villainous voice, and disappeared over the arm of the chair – _over the crest of the hill_ – again.  
  
It seemed to shimmer and fall away as Woody turned back to Jessie, still slumped in Buzz’s arms. She blinked, looking around uncertainly, then fixed her eyes on him and smiled. It was sweet, and sad, and a little bit like the Jessie that he used to know but a little bit like a new one.  
  
“You did good, partner,” he said. He reached out a hand, to help her up, but Jessie did not reach to take it. “Real good.”  
  
“Thank you, Woody.” Jessie wrapped one of her hands around Buzz’s, looking up to him and giving the sweetest smile that Woody had yet seen. Then her head rolled to the side, and her eyes fell closed.


	31. Chapter 31

“Jessie!” Woody lunged forwards, feeling tightness around his chest, and dropped to his knees beside them both. Jessie was limp in Buzz’s arms, and for a moment he was struck by how terribly soft they were, just fabric and small bits of plastic, not hard and stern like the other toys could be. Buzz was so sturdy compared to them.  
  
“It’s okay,” said Buzz. He gently tucked Jessie’s hair back, then reached to unpin the Sheriff’s badge which they had placed on her chest. “She’s sleeping.”  
  
Now that the panic was fading, yes, Woody could see the slow rise and fall of Jessie’s chest. He accepted his badge back, and returned it to its place on his chest. It had felt very strange not wearing it. He had always been Andy’s sheriff, the _good guy_ , the _hero_ , even if Bonnie’s stories had been more flexible and her roles for him more diverse. Being the bad guy had been strange; Potato Head’s timely intervention a show of friendship that he had not expected.  
  
“Good,” said Woody. He put one hand over Buzz’s, on Jessie’s shoulder. “Perhaps you should, too.”  
  
“Not just yet,” said Buzz. “Soon, though. Together.”  
  
A fair answer. Woody nodded, squeezed Buzz’s hand a little harder, and rose to his feet to address the assembled toys. His hat felt strange on his head after this much time, and he removed it, holding it to his chest like a shield.  
  
“A few of you know me,” he said, letting his voice rise up to fill the room. “Some of you know of me, maybe. And...” he paused, and shook his head. “Hey, can someone hit the lights, for me?”  
  
Somehow, it worked. It shouldn’t have done, this stranger walking into their room, tied up and hauled off, but somehow striding out unafraid and drawing Jessie back into play. But someone turned on the lights, and Woody was made more aware than ever of the eyes upon eyes looking onto him. He swallowed, and tried not to wonder how.  
  
“My name is Woody. Sheriff Woody. I had an owner once, and...” his voice faltered, just for a moment. “And he died. And then I had another owner, and he grew up. And then there was a little girl, who loved me. Because children _do_ love toys. And there will always _be_ children. And in return for being there with them, and for letting them grow up, we get to _see_ them grow up. And now... we have to support each other.”  
  
It was so much more than when he had been in Andy’s room. Even with all of the toys – the army men, the monkeys, the smallest of them, they must have numbered dozens altogether – it had not been a shadow of this. There had to be a thousand pairs of eyes, and a few single ones, turned upon him. The hat in his hands seemed weightier. But it was not necessarily an _unpleasant_ feeling, or an _unwelcome_ one. He wasn’t afraid of having to stand for these toys, as he suspected Jessie had once been.  
  
“I’m going to help set this right,” he said, voice ringing loud and clear. “Help. We can all help each other. But for now... we’re going to unlock anything that we locked. And we’re going to sleep. Because I think that we’ve earned it.”  
  
He just hoped that it would be enough.  
  


 

  
  
At first, Woody thought that they might have to take Jessie back to the miniature house to have somewhere to sleep in peace, but Ken and Barbie offered them the main room of the dreamhouse for the night. “It’s the least we can do for you groovy fellows,” said Ken, and Woody supposed that was something.  
  
Buzz stayed by Jessie’s side, holding her hand as she slept. It was not only Jessie that looked more peaceful, the hard lines of her face softened by sleep; it was as if a horror had been drawn from Buzz, as well.  
  
“I’m guessing she didn’t play much any more,” said Woody quietly, somewhere in the middle of the night.  
  
Buzz shook his head. “Not on a regular basis since at least the time I was reawoken. She said it was after the scissors, but... I wondered, sometimes.”  
  
The weight of tiredness was tugging at Woody, and though he shook it off he was just a little bit grateful for it. The reminder that he still needed to sleep, that he was still a toy. That he was not going to walk the same path that Jessie had somehow found herself upon. “She played again tonight,” he said. “She ain’t forgotten.”

“Affirmative,” said Buzz softly. The batteries of the dreamhouse had long since gone flat, and there was no light; it might just have been Woody’s imagination that Buzz was glowing a little again. After all, that was how the story should have gone. When he spoke again, though, his words were weary. “What do we do now, Woody?”  
  
“We unlock the doors,” Woody replied. He grabbed the other chair into the room and pulled it over to the bedside. When he sat down, his knees were almost at chest-height, but at least it was a chair. “We turn on the lights. We encourage toys to work together, not set them against each other.”  
  
“You make it sound so simple.”  
  
“It probably won’t be,” he admitted. “There’ll be toys that want to leave and toys that want to take power, and I’m betting there are always new toys coming in who need to be acclimatised.”  
  
He winced inside as he used the word. That was a little too grown-up.  
  
“But we can do it. There’s a lot of work, but there’s a lot of toys.”  
  
“And there’s you,” said Buzz.  
  
Missing Andy had been the hardest thing about living in Bonnie’s room, that was undeniable. More than once he had looked at the map and wondered, if he went home, whether Andy would find him again some vacation. He wished that he had been able to give Andy a proper goodbye, rather than getting torn away like this. Seeing Bonnie grow and tell her stories – seeing how much she clearly loved him – had helped, but it could not do away with the pain of letting Andy go.  
  
But the others had been painful, too. As much as missing Bo, he missed Buzz and Jessie, and once again wished that he could make proper goodbyes. Dolly and the others had been good friends to him, but the way in which he had lost the others had been so raw. Bonnie holding him at night, so he could listen to her heartbeat, had been the main thing which had soothed him over the years.  
  
“There’s us,” he said to Buzz. “We’re a team, remember? And we’re gonna do this together.” He glanced down at Jessie again. Her hair might have been cut, her cheeks gone pale and her clothes worn, but she was still _Jessie_. Jessie the Yodelling Cowgirl, best in the west. And his friend. “Things always work better when we do.”  
  
He leaned over, and put his hand on top of Buzz’s, so that for a moment all three of them were together like they used to be. Buzz looked down at their hands for a moment, then up to Woody, and smiled.  
  
“Now _there’s_ the Space Ranger I know. I promise, Buzz, starting tomorrow this place is going to get better. Going to _heal_. We can do it.”


	32. Six Months Later

He still had regrets. Leaving Andy was the worst, of course, but leaving Bonnie was bad as well. He had vanished from her life as suddenly as he had come into it, and he just hoped that the other toys would be able to take care of her. They’d certainly been doing a good job when he had seen them.  
  
But toys had to help toys. Humans could not, because they could not know; they had to support each other instead. Rotas in the Caterpillar Room, freedom to move and talk and live at night, helping to mend broken toys so that they did not face the horror of the trash. Lotso had driven out any toy that might have had a hint of leadership about them, and when Jessie had tried to fill the void alone it had almost driven her mad.  
  
“Hey, sheriff.”  
  
Woody turned. He was standing on one of the highest shelves of the Butterfly Room, looking down over the toys below. The sounds of chatter and laughter drifted up, bright enough to make him smile again. As he looked round, Buzz pulled himself up over the edge of the shelf with a grunt and straightened up. He rubbed his left shoulder absently.  
  
“Hi, Buzz. Is it time for the council meeting already?” Woody glanced across to the clock on the opposite wall, but there was still almost an hour yet. There were a dozen toys that made up the council, from both rooms, and whatever was done was by agreement. It made sure that too much weight did not fall onto the shoulders of just one toy. Woody had made sure that it was clear he counted himself honoured to be among them.  
  
“Negative, Woody,” said Buzz. He was smiling, trying to hold it back but failing. Somewhere along the line, they had found some paint, and the scratch on his face had been touched up a little. Though they scar of it was still visible, it was not so stark and white. “There’s something else that we wanted you to see.”  
  
Woody cocked an eyebrow curiously, but there was the warmth of a secret in Buzz’s eyes, and the ranger was clearly having a little fun in keeping whatever it was to himself. Sighing, he threw up his arms. “All right! Let’s see what this is.”  
  
They hopped down the shelves, stopping on the way to say hello to a cabbage patch doll, nod to a couple of Disney Princess girls who tended to hang out together, exchange pleasantries with Bagpuss. It still seemed like every day they found new toys, hiding away behind shelves or under cupboards, needing to be reassuring that they were not going to be punished for staying hidden. Woody was trying to learn everyone’s names, but it was taking time. Strange, as well, that all of them seemed to know him already.  
  
“Say, how’re the Potato Heads doing lately?” he asked Buzz, as they swung down the last piece of string that let them down to floor level.  
  
“Still not talking to you, huh?”  
  
Woody huffed a laugh. “I’m sure they’ll come round eventually. Just gotta give it a few more years.”  
  
“They’re pretty much the same as they ever were,” said Buzz, and Woody couldn’t help chuckling again. “They like it outdoors.”  
  
It had been the little green men who had bought them back, it had turned out. That loyalty had never wavered either, and the little green men had even helped the Potato Heads to hide away. Jessie had never thought to question them, presuming that they would have told anything that they knew immediately.  
  
Rex was, indeed, forgetting that he had been Andy’s toy. It was only fair to him to let him do so. The Potato Heads were starting to slip now as well, and the Little Green Men had long since forgotten. As for Bullseye, nobody was really sure. His ties had always seemed to be to Woody and Jessie, rather than his owners. So long as they were happy, he was happy.  
  
Woody felt a touch of fear as they drew near to the grate again. That had been one of the first things to go, the graveyard or museum or shrine or whatever it had been. It had been too wrong, not a toy’s thing nor a child’s, and when Jessie had looked at it again she had crumpled down on herself and Buzz had needed to carry her away. Barbie and Ken had helped to identify the pieces instead, and they had been properly destroyed, the toys to whom they had once belonged finally laid to rest.

“Woody.” Jessie was waiting for them, and smiling. It seemed like every day her smile got a bit warmer, her movements a bit more confident. Behind her were Barbie and Ken, the latter now wearing a bright scarf to cover the smaller, neater line of glue that put his head back on. Though he couldn’t turn at the neck, he could at least still look the part. “We’ve got a surprise for you.”  
  
“Is everything okay?” he slowed up a bit, spreading his hands warily. There weren’t too many surprises nowadays, which was probably a good thing. He’d had enough of those for a lifetime.  
  
But Buzz patted him on the back warmly, and went over to lift up the edge of the grate. Jessie’s expression was one of barely contained delight as Woody walked cautiously forwards until he was close enough to look through and see the figure inside.  
  
“Howdy, pardner.”  
  
“Slink!” All the fears dropped away in an instant. Woody almost leapt forwards to throw his arms around his old friend’s neck once again. “You...” but he couldn’t find the words, not for how much Slink meant and how much he thought had been lost. He could hear the rattle of the wag of Slink’s tail.  
  
“Aw, come on, Woody,” said Slink, nudging his head against Woody’s cheek. “Takes more’n a short while to keep down toys like us, huh?”  
  
“You’re right,” said Woody softly. He pulled away, though he stayed down on one knee so that he could be eye-to-eye with Slink. After all their years, perhaps he should have known that Slink wouldn’t give up on him that easily. “And you know what? We should go dinosaur rustling sometime.”  
  
Slink gave him a look of confusion, and behind them he heard Jessie laugh. It was careful, but it was there. And that just about made everything worth it once again.

**Author's Note:**

> **Torture is onscreen, graphic, and inflicted upon Stretch (the purple octopus toy).**
> 
>  
> 
> Permanent character deaths: Hamm, Lotso, and the rest of Lotso's gang except for Ken and Stretch.
> 
> Temporary character death: Slink.


End file.
